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^ TRi -WEEKLY ?uBLIC9kTlor/ of TKE BB^T 00^1^^ t^2TA^pAf^UTE,F^T^R^ 



Vul. 8. No. 407. July IT, 1884. Annual Sub»cri|>(Ion, $30.1 



English Men of Letters, Edited by John Moriej 

■/ / 




i neat CLOTH BINDING for this volume can be obtained from any bookseller or newsdealer, price 15cts 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



1. Hyperion 20 

2. Outre-Mer ^ 20 

3., The Happy Boy 10 

4. Arae lo 

5. Frankenstein 10 

6. TheLastof theMohicans.2o 

7. Clytie 20 

8. The Moonstone, Part 1 . 10 

9. The Moonstone, Part 11,10 

10. Oliver Twist 20 

11. The Coming Race 10 

12. Leila 10 

13. The Three Spaniards.. .20 

14. The Tricks of the Greeks.20 

15. L' Abbe Constantin 20 

16. Freckles 20 

17. The Dark Colleen 20 

18. They were Married .... 10 

19. Seekers After God 20 

20. The Spanish Nun 10 

21. Green Mountain Boys.. 20 

22. Fleurette 20 

23. Second Thoughts 20 

24. The New Magdalen 20 

25. Divorce 20 

26. Life of Washington 20 

27. Social Etiquette 15 

28. Single Heart, Double 

Face 10 

29. Irene; or, The Lonely 

Manor 20 

30. Vice Versa 20 

3 1 . Ernest Maltravers 20 

32. The Haunted House... 10 

33. John Halifax ..20 

34. 800 Leagues on the 

, Amazon 10 

35. The Cryptogram 10 

36. Life of Marion 20 

37. Paul and Virginia 10 

38. A Tale of Two Cities. ... 20 

39. The Hermits 20 

40. An Adventure in Thule, 
etc 10 

41. A Marriage in High Life2o 

42. Robin 20 

43. Two on a Tower 20 

44. Rasselas 10 

45. Alice ; a sequel to Er- 

nest Maltravers 20 

46. Duke of Kandos 20 

47. Baron Munchausen 10 

48. A Princ'ss of Thule .... 20 

49. The Secret Despatch — 20 

50. Early Days of Christian- 
ity, 2 Parts, each 20 

51. Vicar of Wakefield 10 

52. Progress and Poverty... 20 

53. The Spy 20 

54. East Lynne 20 

55. A Strange Story 20 

56. Adam Bede, Part 1 15 

Adam Bede, Part II 15 

57. The Golden Shaft 20 

58. Portia 20 

59. Last Days of Pompeii. . .20 

60. The Two Duchesses 20 

61. TomBrown'sSchoolDays.20 

62. Wooing O't, 2 Pts. each. 15 

63. The Vendetta 20 

64. Hypatia, Part 1 15 

Hypatia^ Part II 15 



6s. 
66. 

67. 

68. 
69. 
70, 
71- 
72. 
73. 
74' 
75. 
76. 
77. 
78. 
79- 

80. 
81. 
82. 
83. 

84. 

85. 
86. 
87. 
88. 
89. 
90. 
91. 

92. 

93- 
94. 

95- 

96. 
97. 
98. 
99. 
100. 

lOI. 

102. 
103. 
104. 
105. 
106. 
107. 

108. 
109. 
no. 



Selma 15 

Margaret and her Brides- 

» laids 20 

Horse Shoe Robinson, 

2 Parts, each 15 

Gulliver's Travels 20 

Amos Barton 10 

The Berber 20 

Silas Marner 10 

Queen of the County . . .20 

Life of Cromwell 15 

Jane Eyre 20 

Child'sHist'ry of Engrd.20 

Molly Bawn 20 

Pillone 15 

Phyllis. 20 

Romola, Part 1 15 

Romola, Part II 15 

Science in ShortChapters.20 

Zanoni 20 

A Daughter of Heth 20 

Right and Wrong Uses of 

the Bible 20 

Night andMoming,Pt.I.i5 
NightandMorning,Pt.II 15 

Shandon Bells 20 

Monica 10 

Heart and Science. .... .20 

The Golden Calf 20 

The Dean's Daughter.. .20 

Mrs. Geoffrey 20 

Pickwick Papers, Part 1 . 20 
Pickwick Papers.Part II. 20 

Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 

Macleod of Dare 20 

Tempest Tossed, Part I . ao 
Tempest Tossed^ P't II. 20 
Letters from High Lat- 
itudes 20 

Gideon Fleyce 20 

India and Ceylon 20 

The Gypsy Queen 20 

The Admiral's Ward 20 

Nimport, 2 Parts, each.. 15 

Harry Holbrooke. • 20 

Tritons, 2 Parts, each . . 15 
Let Nothing You Dismay, lo 
Lady Audley's Secret ... 20 
Woman's Pla«e To-day. 20 
Dunallan, 2 parts, each. 15 
Housekeeping and Home 

making 15 

No New Thing 20 

TheSpoopendykePapers.2o 

False Hopes 15 

Labor and Capital 20 

Wanda, 2 parts, each ... 15 
More Words about Bible. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, P't. 1. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, Pt. 1 1. 20 
An Outline of Irish Hist. 10 

The Lerouge Case 20 

Paul Clifford 20 

A New Lease of Life ... 20 

Bourbon Lilies 20 

Other People's Money.. 20 

Lady of Lyons 10 

Ameline de Bourg 15 

A Sea Queen 20 

The Ladies Lindores. ..20 

Haunted Hearts 10 

Loys, Lord Beresford...20 



127. Under Two Flags, Pt I. i 
Under Two Flags, Pt II.: 

128. Money i 

129. In Peril of His Life 2 

130. India; What can it teach 

us? ; 

131. Jets and Flashes j 

132. Moonshine and Margue- 
rites . 

133. Mr. Scarborough's 
Family, 2 Parts, each . . 15 

134. Arden 15 

135. Tower of Percemont. . . .20 

136. Yolande 2a 

137. Cruel London 20 

138. The Gilded Clique 20 

139. Pike County Folks 20 

140. Cricket on the Hearth . 10 

141. Henry Esmond. .20 

142. Strange Adventure' ;* a '/ 
Phaeton -..2* 

143. Denis Duval f io\ 

144. OldCur 3i.jShop,P't I.15 
01dCuTiosityShop,P'rt II. 15 

145. Ivanhoe, Part 1 15 

Ivanhoe, Part II 15 

146. White Wings 20 

147. The Sketch Book 20 

148. Catherine id 

149. Janet's Repentance 10 

150. Bamaby Rudge, Part I..15 
Barnaby Rudge, Part II. 15 

151. Felix Holt 20 

152. Richelieu 10 

153. Sunrise, Part 1 15 

153. Sunrise, Part II 15 

154. Tour of the World in 80 
Days 20 

155. Mystery of Orcival 20 

156. Lovel, the Widower 10 

157. Romantic Adventures of 

a Milkmaid 10 

158. David Copperfield, Part 1.20 
DavidCopperfield.P'rt II. 20 

159. Charlotte Temple 10 

160. Rienzi, 2 Parts, each ... 15 

161. Promise of Marriage .... 10 

162. Faith and Unfaith 20 

163. The Happy Man 10 

164. Barry Lyndon 20 

165. Eyre's Acquittal 10 

166. 20,000 Leagues Under the 
Sea 20 

167. Anti-Slavery Days 20 

168. Beauty's Daughters 20 

169. Beyond the Sunrise 2 

170. Hard Times 2 

171. Tom Cringle's Log 7 

172. Vanity Fair ;. 

i73« Underground Russia : 

174. Middlemarch,2 Pts each.; 

175. Sir Tom : 

176. Pelham ■> 

177. The Story of Ida 

178. Madcap Violet ? 

179. The Little Pilgrim .' 

i8a Kilmeny : 

181. Whist, or Bumblepuppy?.! 

182. That Beautiful Wretch.. r 

183. Her Mother's Sin - 

184. Green Pastures, etc 

i8s, Mysterious Island, P* 




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NOTE. 

The present writer published a study on Burke some twelve years ago. 
It was almost entirely critical, and in no sense a narrative. 'I'he volume 
now submitted to the readers of this Series is biographical rather than 
critical, and not more than about a score of pages have been reproduced 
in it from the earlier book. Three pages (pp. 211-213) have been in- 
serted from an article on Burke contributed by me to the new edition of 
the Eiuyclopadia Britannica ; and I have to thank Messrs. Black for the 
great courtesy with which they have allowed me to transcribe the passage 
here. These borrowings from my former self, the reader will perhaps be 
willing to excuse, on the old (}reek principle, that a man may once say a 
thing as he would have it said, h\<i 5e ovk evfiexerai— he cannot say it twice. 

J. M. 



BURKE. 

CHAPTER I. 

EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS. 

It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke first took 
his seat in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since 
his voice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his 
life, opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the emi- 
nent men of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have 
extolled him as the saviour of Europe. Whigs have detested him 
as the destroyer of his party. One undiscriminating panegyrist 
calls him the most profound and comprehensive of political phi- 
losophers that has 3'et existed in the world. Another and more dis- 
tinguished writer insists that he is a resplendent and far-seeing 
rhetorician, rather than a deep and subtle thinker. A third tells 
us that his works cannot be too much our study, if we mean either 
to understand or to maintain against its various enemies, open ar.d 
concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular constitution of this 
fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary, declares that it would 
be hard to find a single leading principle or prevailing sentiment 
in one half of these works, to which something extremely adverse 
cannot be found in the other half. A fifth calls him one of the 
greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest thinker, who 
ever devoted himself to the practice of English politics. Yet, 
oddly enough, the author of the fifth verdict will have it that this 
great man and great thinker was actually out of his mind, when he 
composed the pieces for which he has been most v/iciely admired 
and revered. 

A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sediment 
of i)arty fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The circumstances of 
the world have since Burke's time undergone variation enough to 
enable us to judge, from many points of view, how far he was the 
splendid pamphleteer of a faction, and how far he was a contributor 
to the universal stock of enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but 
without reaction, settling down to the verdict that Burke is one of 
the abiding names in our history, not because he either saved En- 



jQ BURKE. 



rope or destroyed the Whig party ; but because he added to the 
permanent considerations oii wise political thought, and to the 
maxims of wise practice in great affairs, and because he nnpnnts 
himself upon us with a magnificence and elevation of expression 
that places him among the highest masters of literature, m one ot 
its hic^hest and most commanding senses. Those who have ac- 
quired a love for abstract politics amid the almost mathematical 
closeness and precision of Hobbes, the philosophic calm of Locke 
or Mill, or even the majestic and solemn fervour of Milton, are 
revolted by the unrestrained passion and the decorated style of 
Burke. His passion appears hopelessly fatal to success in the 
\ pursuit of Truth, who does not usually reveal herself to followers 
\ thus inflamed. His ornate style appears fatal to the cautious and 
precise method of statement, suitable to matter which is not known 
at all unless it is known distinctly. Yet the natural ardour which 
impelled Burke to clothe his judgments in glowing and exaggerated 
phrases, is one secret of his power over us, because it kindles in 
those who are capable of that generous infection a respondent in- 
terest and sympathy. But more than this, the reader is speedily 
conscious of the precedence in Burke of the facts of morality and 
conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human affection and 
historical relation, over the unreal necessities of mere abstract logic. 
Burke's mind was full of the matter of great truths, copiously en- 
riched from the fountains of generous and many-coloured feeling. 
He thought about life as a whole, with all its infirmities and all its 
pomps. ^With none of the mental exclusiveness of the moralist by 
profession, he fills every page with solemn reference and meaning ; 
with none of the mechanical bustle of the common politician, he is 
everywhere conscious of the mastery of laws, institutions, and 
goveVnment over the character and happiness of men. Besides 
Thus diffusing a strong light over the awful tides of human circum- 
stance, Burke has the^sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave 
diligence in caring for high things, and in making their hves at once 
rich' and austere." Such a part in a literature is indeed high. We 
feel no emotion of revolt when Mackintosh speaks of Shakespere 
and Burke in the same breath, as being both of them above mere 
talent And we do not dissent when Macaulay, after reading Burke s 
works over again, exclaims, " How admirable ! The greatest man 
since Milton ! " 

The precise date of Burke's birth cannot be stated with cer- 
tainty. All that we can say is that it took place either in 1728 or 
\>T>^ and it is possible that we may set it down in one or the other 
vear as we choose to reckon by the old or the new style. The best 
opinion is that he was born at Dublin on the 12th of January. 1729 
(N.S.). His father was a sohcitor in good practice, and is believed 
to have been descended from some Bourkes of county Limerick, 
who held a respectable local position in the time of the civil wars. 
Burke's mother belonged to the Nagle family, which had a strong 
connexion in the county of Cork ; they had been among the last 



BURKE. J J 

adherents of James II., and they remained firm Catholics. Mrs. 
Burke remained true to the church of her ancestors, and her only 
dau<rhter was brought up in the same faith. Edmund Burke and 
his two brothers, Garret and Richard, were bred in the religion of 
their father ; but Burke never, in after-times, lost a large and gener- 
ous way of thinking about the more ancient creed of his mother 
and his uncles. 

In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore,a village some thirty 
miles away from Dublin, where Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker 
from Yorkshire-, had established himself fifteen years before, and 
had earned a wide reputation as a successful teacher and a o-ood 
man. According to Burke, he richly deserved this high chara*cter. 
It was to Abraham Shackleton tha't he always professed to owe 
whatever gaTn htld -Come to him^from education. If I amanythin<r, 
he said many years afterwards, it is the education I had there that 
has made me so. His master's skill as a teacher did not impress 
him more than the example which was every day set before him of 
uprightness and simplicity of heart. Thirty years later, when 
Burke had the news of Shackleton's death ('1771), •' I had a true 
honour and affection." he wrote, "for that excellent man. I feel 
something like a satisfaction in the midst of my concern, that I was 
fortunate enough to have him once under my roof before his de- 
parture." No man has ever had a deeper or more tender reverence 
than Burke for homely goodness, simple purity, and all the pieties 
of life; it may well be that this natural predisposition of all char- 
acters at once so genial and so serious as his, was finally stamped 
in him by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was' only two 
years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often build up 
habits in the mind that all the lest of a life is unable to pull down. 
In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, 
and he remained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor's 
degree. These five years do not appear to have been spent in 
strenuous industry in the beaten paths of academic routine. Like 
so many other men of great gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory 
and excursive. He roamed at large over the' varied heiglits that 
tempt our curiosity, as the dawn of intelligence first lights them up 
one after another with bewitching visionsand illusive magic. " All 
my studies," Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in the midst of 
them, " have rather proceeded from sallies of passion, than from 
the preference of sound reason ; and, like all other natural appe- 
tites, have been very violent for a season, and very soon cooled, 
ai-.d quite absorbed in the succeeding. I have often thought it a 
humorous consideration to observe and sum up all the madness of 
this kind I have fallen into this two years past. First, I was 
greatly taken with natural philosophy; which, while I should have 
given my mind to logic, employed m'e incessantly. This I call my 
furor 7nathematicus. But this worked off as s'oon as I began to 
read it in the college, as men by repletion cast off their stomachs 
all they have eaten. Then I turned back to logic and metaphysics. 
Here I remained a good while, and with mur'i plpapure nnd tlriii 



12 BURKE. 

was my furor logicus, a disease very common in the dayr, of igno- 
rance, and very uncommon in these enlightened times. Next suc- 
ceeded the furor historiciis^ which also had its day, but is now no 
more, being entirely absorbed in \\'\^>fiiror poeticusP 

This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackleton, the 
son of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those 
close friendships that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition 
fills an energetic manhood. Many tears were shed when the two 
boys parted at Ballitore, and they kept up their intimacy by a steady 
correspondence. They discuss the everlasting dispute as to the 
ultimate fate of those who never heard the saving name of Christ. 
They send one another copies of verses, and Burke prays for 
Shackleton's judgment on an invocation of his new poem, to beau- 
teous nymphs who haunt the dusky wood, which hangs recumbent 
o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned by Shackleton to endea- 
vour to live according to the rules of the Gospel, and he humbly 
accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory plea that in a town 
it is difficult to sit down to think seriously : it is easier, he says, 
to follow the rules of the Gospel in the country, than at Trinity 
College, Dublin. In the region of profaner tilings the two friends 
canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully's Epistles. 
Burke holds for the historian, who has, he thinks, a fine, easy, 
diversified narrative, mixed with reflection, moral and political, 
neither very trite nor obvious, nor out of the way and abstract, and 
this is the true beauty of historical observation. 

Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his friend 
passes the day, but the reader will perhaps be content to learn in 
humbler prose that Burke rose with the dawn, and strode forth 
into the country through fragrant gardens and the pride of May, 
until want of breakfast drove him back unwillingly to the town, 
where amid lectures and books his heart incessantly turned to the 
river and the fir woods of Ballitore. In the evening he again 
turned his back on the city, taking his way "where Liffey rolls her 
dead dogs to the sea," along to the wall on the shore, whence he 
delighted to see the sun sink into the waters, gilding ocean, ships, 
and city as it vanished. Alas, it was beneath the dignity of verse 
to tell us what we should most gladly have known. For, 

" The muse nor can, nor will declare, 
What is my work, and what my studies there." 

What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his under- 
standing, we cannot learn from any other source. He describes 
himself as spending three hours almost every day in the public 
library. " The best way in the world," he adds oddly enough, "of 
killing thought." I have read some history, he says, and among 
other pieces of history, " I am endeavouring to get a little into the 
accounts of this, our own poor country " — a pathetic expression, 
which represents Burke's perpetual mood, as long as he lived, of 
affectionate pity for his native land. Of the eminent Irishmen 



BURKE. X3 

whose names adorn the annals of Trinity College in tlie eighteenth 
century, Burke was only contemporary at the University with one, 
the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time wrote the Vicar of 
IVakcJichi. There is no evidence that at this time he and Gold- 
smith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone to Ox- 
ford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke 
mentions in his letters are only shadows of names. The mighty 
Swift died in 1745, but there is nothing of Burke's upon the event. 
In the same year came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke 
of those who had taken part in it in the same generous spirit that 
he always showed to the partisans of lost historic causes. 

Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother 
had a dangerous illness. In all my life, he writes to his friend, I 
never found so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it 
was before. Burke's f itlier is said to have been a man of angry 
and irritable temper, and their disagreements were frequent. This 
unhappy circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. 
In 1747 Burke's name had been entered at tiie Middle Temple, 
and after tak'ng his degree, he prepared to go to England to pursue 
the ordinary course of a lawyer's studies. He arrived in London 
in the early part of 1750. 

A period of nine years followed, In which the circumstances 
of Burke's life are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity. He 
seems to have kept his terms in the regular way at the Temple, 
and from the mastery of legal principles and methods which he 
afterwards showed in some important transactions, we might infer 
that he did more to qualify himself for practice than merely dine 
in the hall of his Inn. For law, alike as a profession and an in- 
strument of mental discipline, he had always the profound respect 
that it so amply deserves, though he saw that it was not without 
drawbacks of its own. The law, he said, in his fine description of 
George Grenville, in words that all who think about schemes of 
education ought to ponder, " is, in my opinion, one of the first 
and noblest of human sciences : a science which does more to 
quicken a7id invigorate the nnderstanding than all the other kinds 
of learjiing put together ; but it is not apt, except in persons very 
happily born, to open and to liberalise the mind exactly in the same 
proportion."* Burke was never called to the bar, and the circum- 
stance that, about the time when he oiight to have been looking 
for his first guinea, he published a couple of books which had as 
little as possible to do with either law or equity, is a tolerably sure 
sign that he had followed the same desultory courses at the Tem- 
ple as lie had followed at Trinity College. We have only to tell 
over a^cain a very old story. The vague attractions of literature 
prevailed over, the duty of taking up a serious profession. His 
father, who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a 
barrister, was first suspicious, then extremely indignant, and at last 
he withdrew his son's allowance, or else reduced it so low that the 

*■ A ntericmi Taxation. 



14 



BURKE. 



recipient could not possibl}- live upon it. This catastrophe took 
place some time in 1755 — a year of note in the history of literature, 
as the date of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary. It was 
upon literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most 
dangerous of professions, that Burke, like so many hundreds of 
smaller men before and since, now threw himself for a livelihood. 

Of the details of the struggle we know very little. Burke was 
not fond in after-life of talking about liis earlier days, not because 
he had any false shame about the straits and iiard shifts of youth- 
ful neediness, but because he was endowed with a certain inborn 
stateliness of nature, which made him unwilling to waste thoughts 
on the less dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, 
and Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and embar- 
rassments in his existence, if he had been capable of letting the 
detail of the day lie more heavily upon him. So far as it goes, how- 
ever, it is a sign of mental health that a man should be able to cast 
behind him the barren memories of bye-gone squalor. We maybe 
sure that whatever were the external ordeals of his apprenticeship 
in the slippery craft of the literary adventurer, Burke never failed 
in keeping for his constant companions generous ambitions and high 
thoughts. He appears to have frequented the debating clubs in 
Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent Garden, and he showed the 
common taste of his time for the theatre. He was much of a wan- 
derer, partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the 
world, and partly because his health was weak. In after-life he 
was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearing the strain 
of prolonged application to books and papers in the solitude of his 
library, but of bearing it at the same time with the distracting com- 
bination of active business among men. At the date of which we 
are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in Mon- 
mouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in retired coun- 
try villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in ccmpany 
with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman. It 
would be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies. 
We are practically reduced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to 
his son in after-years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which 
is pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his own 
knowledge. '■''Reading.,'''' he says, '•'■ aiid jnuch reading is good. B7it 
the power of dive?'sifying the matter in yonr own 7nijid, ajid of ap- 
plying it toe7'ery occasion that arises, is far better .; so don'' t suppress 
the vivida vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than obscure 
and tantalising glimpses, tantalising, because he was then at the 
age when character usually either fritters itself away,or grows strong 
on the inward sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations. Writ- 
ing from Battersea to his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he 
begins with an apology for a long silence which seems to have con- 
tinued from months to years. " I have broken all rules ; I have 
neglected all decorums ; everything except that I have never forgot 
a friend, whose good head and heart have made me esteem and 
love him. What appearance there may have been of neglect, 



ni'RKE. 

arises from my m-nner nf life: chequered with various desi<rns • 
sometimes m London, sometimes in remote parts of the counlrv ' 
sometimes m France, and shortly, please God, to be in America '" ' 
One of the hundred inscrutable rumnnrs that hovered about 
Burke s name was, that he ai one time ;iriu;dlv did visit America 
This was just as untrue as that he beciunt- a convert to the Catho- 
lic faith ; or that he was the lover of Pei^r VVoffiiigton ; or that he 
contested Adam Smith's chair of moral philosophy at GIas<row 
along witn Hume, and that both Burke and Hume were rejected 
in favour of some fortunate Mr. James Clow. Thev are all alike 
unfounded. But the same letter informs ShackleJon of a circum- 
stance more real and more important than any of these, thoucrh its 
details are only dou])tfullv known. Burke had married— when and 
where, we cannot tell. Probablv the marriajre took place in the 
winter of 1756. His wife was the daui^diter of Dr. Nucrent an 
Irish physician once settled at Bath. Onestorv is that BuH<e con- 
sulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and fell in 
love Nvith his daughter. Another version makes Burke consult him 
a ter Dr. Nugent had removed to London ; and tells how the kindly 
physician, considering that the noise and bustle of chambers over 
a shop must hinder his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in 
hi.s own house. However these things may have been, all the 
evidence shows Burke to have been fortunate in the choice or acci- 
dent that bestowed upon him his wife. Mrs. Burke, like her father 
was, up to the time of her marriage, a Catholic. Good iudcres be- 
longing to her own sex describe her as gentle, quiet, sof? in her 
manners, and well bred. She had the qualities which best fitted 
and disposed her to soothe the vehemence and irritability of her 
companion. Though she afterwards conformed to the religion of 
her husband, it was no insignificant coincidence that in two of the 
deares^t relations of his life the atmosphere of Catholicism was thus 
poured round the great preacher of the crusade against the Revolu- 

About the time of his marriage, Burke made his first appearance 
a^ an author. It wa.s in 1756 that he published A Vinkation of 
Aatural Sociey,^n,\ the more important essav, ^ Philosophical 
Inquiry into the Oripn of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. 
I he latter of them had certainly been written a long time before 
and there is even a traditional legend that Burke wrote it when he 
was only nineteen years old. Both of these performances have in 
ciitterent degrees a historic meaning, but neither of them would 
have survived to our own day unless they had been associated with 
a name of power. A few words will suffice to do. justice to them 
Jiere. And first as to the Vindicatiou of Natural Society. Its 
alternative title was. A View of the Miseries and Evils arising to 
Mankind from every Species of Civil Society, in a Letter to 

j^ord , dya late Noble Writer. Bolingbroke had died in 1751, 

and in I754hjs philosophical works were posthumously given to 
the woHd by David Mallet, Dr. Johnson's beggarly Scotchman, to 
whom Bolingbroke had left half-a-crown in his wilj, for lirino- off a 



J 6 BUKKE. 

blunderbuss which he was afraid to fire off himself. The world of 
letters had been keenly excited about Bolingbroke. His busy and 
chequered career, his friendship with the great wits of the previous 
oent-'ration, his splendid style, his hold opinions, made him a daz- 
zling figure. This was the late Nol le Writer whose opinions Burke 
intended to ridicule, by reducing them to an absurdity in an exaggera- 
tion of Bolingbroke's own manner. As it happened, the public did 
not readily perceive either the exaggeration in the manner, or the 
satire in the matter. Excellent jucrges of style made sure that the 
writing was really Bolingbroke's, and serious critics of philosophy 
never doubted that the writer, whoever he was, meant all that he 
said. We can hardly help agreeing with Godwin, when he says 
that in Burke's treatise the evils of existing political institutions, 
which had been described by Locke, are set forth more at large, 
with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence, though 
the declared intention of the writer was to show that such evils 
ought to be considered merely trivial. Years afterwards, Boswell 
asked Johnson whether an imprudent publication by a certain friend 
of his at an early period of his life, would be likely to hurt him ? 
" No, sir/' replied the sage ; " not much ; it might perhaps be men- 
tioned at an election." It is significant that in 1765, when Burke 
saw his chance of a seat in Parliament, he thought it worth while 
to print a second edition of his Vindication, with a preface to assure 
his readers that the design of it was ironical. It has been remarked 
as a very extraordinary "circumstance that an author who had the 
greatest' fame of any man of his day as the master of a superb 
style, for this was indeed Bolingbroke's position, should have been 
imitated to such perfection by a mere novice, that accomplished 
critics like Chesterfield and Warburton should have mistaken the 
copy for a first-rate original. It is, however, to be remembered 
that the very boldness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose 
rendered it more fit for imitation, than if its merits had been those 
of delicacy or subtlety ; and w# must remember that the imitator 
was no pygmy, but himself one of the giants. What is certain is 
that the study of Bolingbroke which preceded this excellent imita- 
tion left a permanent mark, and traces of Bolingbroke were never 
effaced from the style of Burke. 

The point of the Vindication is simple enough. It is to show 
that the same instruments which Bolingbroke had employed in 
favour of natural against revealed religion, could be employed with 
equal success in favour of natural as against, what Burke calls, 
artificial society. " Show me," cries the writer, " an absurdity in 
religion, and I will undertake to show you a hundred for one in 
political laws and institutions. ... If, after all, you should confess 
all these things yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak 
and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior 
force, concerning the necessity of artificial religion ; and every step 
you advance in your argument, you add a strength to mine. So 
that, if we are resolved to submit our reason and our liberty to civil 
usurpation, we have nothing to do but to conform as quietly as w6 



BURKE. 17 

can to tlie vulgar notions which are connected with this, and take 
u|) the theolo<]:y of the vulgar as well as their politics. But if we 
think this necessity rather imaginary than real, we should renounce 
their dreams of society, together with their visions of icligicn, 
and vindicate ourselves into perfect liberty." 

The most interesting fact about this spirited performance is, 
that it is a satirical literary hantlling of the great proposition uliich 
Burke enforced, with all the thunder and lurid effulgence of his 
most passionate rhetoric, five-and-thirty years later. This propo- 
sition is that the world would fall into ruin, "if the practice of all 
moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having 
their leasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual." 
The satire is intended for an illustration of what with Burke was 
the cardinal truth for men, namely, that if you encourage every in- 
dividual to let the imagination loose upon all subjects, without anv 
restraint from a sense of his own v.eakness, and his subordinate 
rank in the long scheme of things, then there is nothing of all that 
the o[)inion of ages has agreed to regard as excellent and vener- 
able, which would not be exposed to "destruction at the hands of 
rationalistic criticism. This was Burke's most fundamental and 
unswerving conviction from the first piece that he wrote down to 
the last, and down to the last hour of his existence. 

It is a coincidence worth noticing that onlv two vears before 
the appearance of the Vindication, Rousseau had published the 
second of the two memorable Discourses in which he insisted with 
serious eloquence on that which Burke treats as a triumph of irony. 
He believed, and many thousands of Frenchmen came to a specu- 
lative agreement with him, that artificial society had marked a 
decline in the felicity of man, and there are passages in the Dis- 
course in which he demonstrates this, that are easily interchange- 
able with passages in the Vindication. Who would undertake to 
tell us from internal evidence whether the following page, with its 
sombre glow, is an extract from Burke, or an extrac't from the book 
which Rousseau begins by the sentence that man is born free, yet 
is he everywhere in chains ? 

There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people em- 
ployed in lead, tin, iron, copijcr, and coal mines; these unhn])py wretches 
scarce ever see the light of the sun ; they are buried in the liowels of the 
earth; there they work at a severe and dismal task, without the least pros- 
pect of being delivered from it ; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst 
sort of fare ; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives 
cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapour of these nialig.^ 
nant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without 
remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery, 
necessary in refining and managing the jiroducts of those mines. If any 
man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were con- 
denmed to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy suffer- 
ers, and how great would be our just indignation against those who in- 
flicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment! . . . But this number, 
considerable as it is, and the slavery, with all its baseness and horror, 
which we have at home, is nothing to what the rest of the world affords 

2 



ig BURKE. 

of the same nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and 
destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to say nothing of 
those other employments, those stations of wretchedness and contempt, 
in which civil society has placed the numerous enfans perdus of her army. 
Would any rational man submit to one of the most tolerable of these 
drudgeries, for all the r.rtificial enjoyments which policy has made to result 
from them ? . . . Indeed, the blindness of one part of mankind co-oper- 
ating with the frenzy and villany of the other, has been the real builder of 
this respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of man- 
kind has caused their slavery, in re. urn their state of slavery is made a 
pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness; for the politician 
will tell you gravely, that their life of servitude disqualifies the greater 
part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies them with no 
other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is but too true ; and this is 
one of the reasons for which I blame such institutions. 

From the very beginning, therefore, Burke was drawn to the 
deepest of all the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century. 
Johnson and Goldsmith continued the traditions of social and 
polite literature which had been established by the Queen Anne 
men. Warburton and a whole host of apologists carried on the 
battle against deism and infidelity. Hume, after furnishing the 
arsenal of scepticism with a new array of deadlier engines and more 
abundant ammunition, had betaken himself placidly to the compo- 
sition of history. What is remarkable in Burke's first performance 
is his discernment of the important fact, that behind the intellectual 
disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noiser agitations 
in the sphere of theology, tliere silently stalked a force that might 
shake the whole fabric of civil society itself. In France, as all 
students of its speculative history are agreed, there came a time 
in the eighteenth century when theological controversy was turned 
into political controversy. Innovators left the question about the 
truth of Christianity, and busied themselves with questions about 
the ends and means of governments. The appearance of Burke's 
Vindication of A^afiiral Society co\nc\diQS in time with the beginning 
of this important transformation. Burke foresaw from the first 
what, if rationalism were allowed to run an unimpeded course, 
would be the really great business of the second half of his cen- 
tury. 

If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to the pro- 
found movement of the time, in the second he dealt with one of 
the most serious of its more superficial interests. The essay on 
the Sublime and Beautiful fell in with a set of topics, on which the 
curiosity pf the better minds of the age, alike in France, England, 
and Gerrnany, >vas fully stirred. In England the essay has been 
prdinarily slighted; it has perhaps been overshadowed by its au- 
thor's fame in vi^eightier matters. The nearest approach to a full 
and serious treatment of its main positions is to be found in Dugald 
Stewart's lectures. The great rhetorical art-critic of our own day 
refers to it in words of disj)aran;cmcnt, and in truth it has none of 
thcn;i-::i v •!" ri > '-•- r-;-] ic;' ; :i. :ti.;:: \\.:^q ti h - \ 'J.ua-x' 



BURKE. xg 

and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated Les- 
sing, the author of Laokoon (1766), by far the most definitely valu- 
able of all the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which 
was not poor in them. Lessing was so struck with the Inquiry 
that he set about a translation of it, and the correspondence be- 
tween him and Moses Mendelssohn on the questions which Burke 
liad raised, contains the germs of the doctrine as to poetry and 
painting which Laokoon afterwards made so famous. Its influence 
on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the German historian 
of the literature of the century in bestowing on it the coveted epithe'; 
of epoch-making. 

The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side of tin* 
eigliteenth century when Burke tells us that a tliirst for Variety ma 
architecture is sure to leave very little true taste ; or that an air \jii 
robustness and strengtli is very prejudicial to beauty ; or that sad 
fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sec- 
tions, again, are litde more than expanded definitions from the die 
tionary. Any tiro may now be shocked at such a proposition aa 
that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system. But 
at least one signal merit remains to the Inquiry. It was a vigorous 
enlargement of the principle, which Addison had not long before 
timidly illustrated, that critics of art seek its principles in the wrong 
place, so long as they limit their search to poems, pictures, engrav- 
ings, statues, and buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments 
and faculties in man to which art makes its appeal. Addison's 
treatment was slight, and merely literary ; Burke dealt boldly vvith 
his subject on the base of the most scientific psychology that was 
then within his reach. To approach it on the psychological side at 
all, was to make a distinct and remarkable advance in the method 
of the inquiry which he had taken in hand. 



20 aUKKE. 



CHAPTER II. 

IN irel/.::d -parliament — beaconspield. 

Burke was thirty years old before be approaclied ev^en the 
threshold of the arena in which he was destined to I'C so great a 
figure. He had made a mark in hterature, and it was to literature 
rather than to public affairs that his ambition turned. He had 
naturally l^-ecome acquainted with the brother authors who haunted 
the coffee-houses in Fleet Street ; and Burke, along with his 
father-in-law, Dr. Nugent, was one of the first memlers of the 
immortal club where Johnson did conversational battle with all 
comers. We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on 
Burke's friendships with the followers of his first profession, and 
on the active syinpathy with which he helped those/who were 
struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, the fragments that remain 
of his own attempts in this direction are no considerable con- 
tributions. His Hints for an Essay on the Drama are jejune and 
infertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought 
of Diderot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an 
Account of the European Settlements in America. His Abridg- 
vieni of the History of England comes down no further than to 
the reign of John. A much uK^e important undertaking than 
his history of the past, was his design for a yearly chronicle 
of the present. The Annual Register began to appear in 1759. 
Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, provided the sinews of war, 
and he gave Burke a hundred pounds a year for his survey of the 
great events which were then passing in the world. The scheme 
was probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for this was 
the climax of the Seven Years' War. The clang of arms was henrd 
in every quarter of the globe, and in East and West new lands 
were being brought under the dominion of Great Britain. 

In this^ exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to be 
acquainted with public men. In 1759 ^^^ was introduced, probably 
by Lord Charlemont, to William Gerard Hamilton, who only sur- 
vives in our memories by his nickname of Single-speech. As a 
matter of fact, he made many speeches in Parliament, and some 
good ones, but none so good as the first, delivered in a debate in 
1755, in which Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Murray all took part, and 
were all outshone by the new luminary. But the new luminary 
never shone again with its first brilliance. He sought Burke out 



BURKE. 21 

on the strength of the success of the Vindication of Aaijiral 
Society, and he seems to have had a taste forgood company. Horace 
Walpole describes a dinner at his house in the summer of i 761. 
" There were Garrick," he says, " and a young Mr. Burke, who wrote 
a book in the style of Lord BoHngbroke, that is much admired. 
He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and 
thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. Ha 
will know i)etter one of these days." The prophecy came true in 
time, but it was Burke's passion for authorism that eventually led 
to a rupture with his tirst jxitron. Hamilton was a man of ability, 
but selfish and unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described 
him compendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker-hearted, 
envious reptile. 

In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, 
and Burke accompanied him in some indefinite capacity. "The 
absenteeism of her men of genius," an eminent historian has said, 
" was a worse wrong to Ireland that the absenteeism of her land- 
lords. If Edmund Burke had remained in the country where 
Providence had placed him, he might have changed the current 
of its history." * It is at least to be said that Burke was ""ever so 
absorbed in other affairs, as to forget the peculiar interests of his 
native land. We have his own word, and his career does not belie 
it, that in the elation with which he was filled on being elected a 
member of Parliament, what was first and up])ermost in his thoughts 
was the hope of being somewhat useful to the ].')lace of his birth 
and education ; and to the last he had in it " a dearness of instinct 
more than he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs of Ireland 
had a most important part in Burke's life at one or two critical 
moments, and this is as convenient a place as we are likely to find 
for describing in a few words what were the issues. The brief space 
can hardly be grudged in an account of a great political writer, for 
Ireland has furnished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of English 
statesmen. 

Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England 
just what the American colonies would have been, if they had 
contained, besides the European settlers, more than twice their 
number of unenslaved negroes. After the suppression of the great 
rebellion of Tyrconncl by William of Orange, nearly the whole of 
the land was confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and 
outlaws, the Penal Laws against the CatJiolics were enacted and en- 
forced, and the grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its 
vileness and completeness. The Protestants and landlords were 
supreme : the peasants and the Catholics were prostrate in despair. 
The Revolution brouoht about in Ireland just the reverse of what 
it effected in England. Here it delivered the body of the nation 
from the attempted supremacy of a small sect. There it made a 
small sect supreme over the body of the nation. "It was, to say 
the truth,-' Burke wrote, " not a revolution but . conquest," and 
the policy of conquest was treated as the just and normal system 

* Froude'- Ireland, ii. 214. 



2 2 BURKE. 

of government. The last conquest of England was in the eleventh 
century. The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end of the 
seventeenth. 

Sixty years after these events, when Burke revisited Ireland, 
some important changes had taken place. The Enghsh settlers of 
the beginning of the century had formed an Irish interest. They 
had become Anglo-Irish, just as the colonists still furtlier west had 
formed a colonial interest and become Anglo-American. The same 
conduct on the part of the mother country promoted the growth of 
these hostile interests in both cases. The commercial policy pur- 
sued by England towards America was identical with that pursued 
towards Ireland. The industry of the Anglo-Irish traders was re- 
stricted, their commerce and even tlieir production fettered, their 
prosperity checked, for the benefit of the merchants of Manchester 
and Bristol. Crescit Roma AlbcE minis. "The bulk of the peo- 
ple," said Stone, the Primate, " are not regularly either lodged, 
clothed, or fed ; and those things which in England are called 
necessaries of life, are to us only accidents, and we- can, and in 
many places do, subsist without them." On the other hand, the 
peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent their spoliation and 
attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery under the exac- 
tions of landlords and a church which tried to spread Christianity 
by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth to White- 
l oyism — terrible spectre, which, under various names and with 
various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time. 

Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims 
of the colonial and commercial system ; the Catholic land-owners 
legally dispossessed by the operation of the penal laws ; the Catho- 
lic peasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive 
spirit; and the imperial government standing very much aloof, and 
leaving the country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and 
some Protestant churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly dis- 
contented with the mother country ; and the Catholic native Irish 
Kvere regarded by their Protestant oppressors with exactly that 
combination of intense contempt and loathing, and intense rage 
and terror, which their American counterpart would have divided 
between the Negro and the Red Indian. To the Anglo-Irish the 
native peasant was as odious as the first, and as terrible as the 
second. Even at the close of the century Burke could declare that 
the various descriptions of the people were kept as much apart, as 
if they were not only separate nations, but separate species. There 
were thousands, he says, who had never talked to a Roman Catho- 
lic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to a gardener's 
workman, or some other labourer of the second or third order, while 
a little time before this they were so averse to have them near their 
persons, that they would not employ even those who could never 
find their way beyond the stables. Chesterfield, a thoroughly im- 
partial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poor people in Ire- 
land were used worse than negroes by their masters and the mid- 
dlemen. We should never forget that in the transactions with the 



BURKE. 23 

English government during the eighteenth century, the people con- 
cerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists of 
1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said of them, not 
founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and for- 
uuie, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious 
and political prejudices — distinctions which, more than any other, 
animate both the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and 
indignation of the oppressed. 

The directions in which Irish imi;)rovement \\ould move, were 
clear from the middle of the century to men with much less fore- 
sight than Burke had. The removal of all commercial restrictions, 
either by Independence or Union, on the one hand ; and the grad- 
ual emanci riiion of the Catholics, on the other : were the two pro- 
cesses 10 wiiich every consideration of good government manifestly 
])ointed. The first proved a much shorter and simp'er process than 
the second. To the first the oiily obstacle was the blindness and 
selfishness of the English merchants. The second had to over- 
come the virulent opposition of the tyrannical Protestant faction in 
Ireland, and the disgraceful but deep-rooted antipathies of the 
English naiion. The history of the relation between the mother 
country and her dependency during Burke's life, may be character- 
ised as a commercial and le,<:i:islative struggle between the imperial 
government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in which each side for 
its own convenience, as the turn served, drew support from the 
Catholic majority. 

A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circumstances of 
disorder and violence, took place while Burke was in Ireland. It 
suited the interests of faction to represent these commotions as 
the symptoms of a deliberate rebellion. The malcontents were 
represented as carrying on treasonable correspondence, sometimes 
with Spain and sometimes with France ; they were accused of re- 
ceiving money and arms from their foreign- sympathisers, and of 
aiming at throwing off the English rule. Burke says that he had 
means and the desire of informing himself to the bottom upon the 
matter, and he came strongly to the conclusion that this was not 
a true view of what had happened. What had happened was due, 
he thought, to no plot, but to superficial and fortuitous circum- 
stances. He consequently did not shrink from describing it as 
criminal, that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should have 
been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecution, and 
that numbers of them should have been ruined in fortune, im- 
prisoned, tried, -"■'d capitally executed for a rebellion which was no 
rebellion at all. The episode is only important as illustrating 
the strong a- ' manly temper i:i which Burke, unlike too many 
of his countryme-^ with rtunco to make by English favour, 
uniformly considered th circumstanceo of hir. country. It was 
not until a later time th he had an opportunity of acting conspic' 
uously on h':r behalf, but whatever influence h^ ca: ^ to acquir 
with hir. party was unflinching'^ used against the cruel of English 
prejudice. 



24 BURKE. 

Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years* 
(i 761-3.) In 1763 Hamilton, who had found him an in valuable 
auxiliary, procured for him, principally with the aid of the Primate 
Stone, a pension of three hundred pounds a year from the Irish 
Treasury. In thanking him for his service, ^Burke proceeded to 
bargain that the obligation should not bind him to give to his 
patron the whole of his time. He insisted on being left with a 
discreet liberty to continue a little work which he had as a rent- 
charge upon his thoughts. Whatever advantages he had acquired, 
he says, had been due to literary reputation, and he could only 
hope for a continuance of such advantages on condition of doing 
something to keep the same reputation alive. What this literary 
design was we do not know with certainty. It is believed to have 
been a history of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment re- 
mains. Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to 
Hamilton, With an irrational stubbornness that may well astound 
us when we think of the noble genius that he thus wishes to con- 
fine to paltry personal duties, he persisted that Burke should bind 
himself to his service for life, and to the exclusion of other in- 
terests. "To rircumscribe my hopes," cried Burke, " to give up 
even the possi il ty of libeity, to annihilate myself for ever I " He 
threw up the ptniion, which he had held for two years, an. I declined 
all further connexion with Hamilton, whom he roundly described 
as an infamous scoundrel.. "Six of the best years of my life he 
took me from every pursuit of my literary reputation, or of im- 
provement of my fortune. ... In all this time you may easily 
conceive how rnuch I felt at seeing myself left behind by almost 
all of my contemporaries. There never was a season more favour- 
able for any man who chose to enter into the career of public life ; 
and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my own 
moral character, and my industry, my friends and connexions, when 
Mr. Hamilton first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior 
to those of several whose fortune is at this day upon a very differ- 
ent footing from mine." 

It was not long before a more important opening offered itself, 
which speedily brought Burke into the main stream of public life. 
In the summer of 1765 a change of ministry took place. It was 
the third since the king's accession five years' ago. First, Pitt had 
been disgraced, and the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed. Then 
Bute came into power, but Bute quailed before the storm of 
calumny and hate which his Scotch nationality, and the supposed 
source of his power over the king, had raised in every town in 
England. After Lord Bute, George Grenville undertook the Gov- 
ernment. Before he had been many months in office, he had sown 
the seeds of war in the colonies, wearied parliament, and disgusted 
the king. In June, 1765, Grenville was dismissed. With profound 
reluctance the king had no other choice than to summon Lord Rock- 
ingham, and Lord Rockingham, in a happy moment for himself and 
his party, was induced to offer Burke a post as his private secre- 
tary. A government by country gentlemen is too apt to be a gov- 



BURKE. 2" 

ernment of iijjnorance, and Lord Rockingham was without either 
experience or knowledge. He felt, or friends felt for him, the ad- 
vantage of having at his side a man wlio was chiefly known as an 
author in the service of Dodsley, and as having conducted the 
Annual Re^iste?' with great ability, but who even then was widely 
spoken of as nothing less than an encyclopaedia of political knowl- 
edge. 

It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to Lord 
Rockingham by William Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert was President 
of the Pjoard of Trade in the new government, but he is more likely 
to be remembered as Dr. Johnson's famous example of the truth 
of the observation, that a man will please more upon the whole by 
negative qualities than by positive, because he was the most ac- 
ceptable man in London, and yet overpowered nobody by the 
superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by 
being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oI)lige you to hear 
much from him, and did not oppose what you said. Besides Fitz- 
herbert's influence, we have it on Burke's own authority that his 
promotion was partly due to that mysterious person, William 
Burke, who was at the same time appointed an under-secretary of 
state. There must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to the 
Burke connexion, and we shall presently consider what they were 
worth. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke of New- 
castle hurried to the new premier, and told him the appointment 
would never do : that the new secretary was not only an Irish ad- 
venturer, which was true, but that he was an Irish papist, which 
was not true ; that he was a Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint 
Omer's, and that his real name was O'Bourke. Lord Rockingham 
behaved like a man of sense and honour, sent for Burke, and re- 
peated to him what he had heard. Burke warmly denounced the 
truthlessness of the Duke's tattle : he insisted that the reports 
which his chief had heard would probably, even unknown to him- 
self, create in his mind such suspicions as would stand in the way 
of a thorough confidence. No earthly consideration, he said, 
should induce him to continue in relations with a man whose trust 
in him was not entire ; and he pressed his resignation. To this 
Lord Rockingham would not consent, and from that time until his 
death, seventeen years afterwards, the relations between them 
were those of loyal and honourable service on the one hand, and 
generous and appreciative friendship on the other. Six-and-twenty 
years afterwards (1791) Burke remembered the month in which he 
had first become connected with a man whose memory, he said, 
will ever be precious to Englishmen of all parties, as long as the 
ideas of honour and virtue, jDublic and private, are understood and 
(herished in this nation. 

The Rockingham ministry remained in office for a year and 
twenty days (1765-6). About the middle of this term (Dec. 26, 
1765), Burke was returned to Parliament for the borough of Wen- 
dover, by the influence of Lord Verney, who owned it, and who 
also returned William Burke for another borough. Lord Verney 



26 BURKE. 

was an Irish peer, with large property in Buckinghamshire; h« 
now represented that county in Parliament. It was William 
Burke's influence with Lord Verney tliat procured for his name- 
sake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first speech in the 
House of Commons a few days after the opening of the session of 
1766 (Jan. 27), and was honoured by a compliment from Pitt, still 
the Great Commoner. A week later he spoke again on the same 
momentous theme, the complaints of the American colonists, and 
success was so marked that good judges predicted, in the stiff 
phraseology of the time, that he would soon add the palm of the 
orator to the laurel of the writer and the philosopher. The friendly 
Dr. Johnson wrote to Langton, that Burke had gained more repu- 
tation than any man at his first appearance had ever gained before. 
The session was a great triumph to the new member, but it brought 
neither strength nor popularity to the administration. At the end 
of it, the king dismissed them, and the Chatham government was 
formed ; that strange combination which has been made famous by 
Burke's description of it, as a piece of joinery so crossly indented 
and whimsically dove-tailed, such a piece of diversified mosaic, 
such a tesselated pavem.ent without cement, that it was indeed a 
very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand 
upon. There was no obvious reason why Burke should not have 
joined the new ministry. The change was at first one of persons, 
rather than of principles or of measures. To put himself, as Burke 
afterwards said, out of the way of the negotiations which were then 
being carried on very eagerly and through many channels with the 
Earl of Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change of 
ministry. He was free from party engagements, and more than 
this, he was free at the express desire of his friends ; for on the 
very day of his return, the Marquis of Rockingham wished him to 
accept office under the new system. Burke '• believes he might 
have had such a situation, but he cheerfully took his fate with his 
party." In a short time he rendered his party the first of a long 
series of splendid literary services by writing his Observations on 
the Present State of the Nation (1769). It was a reply to a pam- 
phlet by George Grenville, in which the disappointed minister 
accused his successors of ruining the country. Burke, in answer- 
ing the charge, showed a grasp of commercial and fiscal details at 
least equal to that of Grenville himself, then considered the first 
man of his time in dealing with the national trade and resources. 
To this easy mastery of the special facts of the discussion, Burke 
added the far rarer art of lighting them up by broad principles, and 
placing himself and his readers at the highest and most effective 
point of view for commanding their general bearings. 

If Burke had been the Irish adventurer that his enemies de- 
scribed, he might well have seized with impatience the opening to 
office that the recent exhibition of his powers in the House of 
Commons had now made accessible to him. There was not a man 
in Great Britain to wl-iom the emoluments of office would have been 
more useful, il io one cf ti.e ttfjuiin;;; r.-iy:,'c.ies iri I'ttrary Liog- 



BURKE. 27 

rapliy, how Burke could think of entering Parh':iment without any 
means that anybody can now trace of earning a fittinfy livelihood. 
Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw not lonj^ ago writing for the 
booksellers, had become affluent enough to pay a yearly allowance 
to Barry, the painter, in order to enable him to study the pictures 
in the great European galleries, and to make a prolonged residence 
at Rome. A little later he took a step which makes t:he riddle still 
more difficult, and which has given abundant employment to wits 
who are inaximi in ;nini;uis, and think that every question which 
they can ask, yet to which history has thought it worth while to 
leave no answer, is somehow a triumph of their own learning and 
dialectic. 

In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands krown as Gregories, 
in the parishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the county of Bucks. 
It has often been asked, and naturally enough, how a man who, 
hardly more than a few months before, was still contented to earn 
an extra hundred pounds a year by writing for Dodsley, should now 
have launched out as the buyer of a fine house and estate, which 
cost upwards of twenty-two thousand pounds, which could not be 
kept up on less than two thousand five hundred a year, and of which 
the returns did not amount to one-fifth of that sum. Whence did 
he procure the money, and what is perhaps more difficult to answer, 
how came he first to entertain the idea of a design so ill-propor- 
tioned to anything that we cr.n now discern in his means and pros- 
pects ? The common answer from Burke's enemies, and even from 
some neutral inquirers, gives to every lover of this great man's 
high character an unpleasant shock. It is alleged that he had 
plunged into furious gambling in East India stock. Tlie charge 
was current at the time, and it was speedily revived when Burke's 
abandonment of his party, after the French Revolution, exposed him 
to a thousand attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. It has 
been stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our own time, 
and none of the biographers have dealt with the perplexities of the 
matter as they ought to have done. Nobody, indeed, has ever pre- 
tended to find one jot or tittle of direct evidence that Burke him- 
self took a part in the gambling in India or other stocks. There 
is evidence that he was a holder of the stock, and no more. But 
what is undeniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William 
Burke, his intimate if not his kinsman, and Lord Vcrney, his po- 
litical patron, were all three at this time engaged together in im- 
mense transactions in East India stock; that in 1769 the stock fell 
violently; that they were unable to pay their differences ; and that 
in the very year in which Edmund Burke bought Gregories, they 
were utterly ruined, two of them beyond retrieval. Again it is 
clear that, after this, Richard Burke was engaged in land-jobbing 
in the West Indies ; that his clMini . were disputed by the Govern- 
ment as questionable and (^ish )nest ; and that he lost his case. 
Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of the day, to be deeply 
interested in land at Saint Vincent's. But there is no evidence. 
What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant taint of speculation 



28 BURKE, 

and financial adveiitureship hung at one time about the whole con- 
nexion, and that the adventures invariably came to an unlucky end. 

Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were relations or 
not, and if so, in what degree they were relations, neither of them 
ever knew ; they believed that their fathers sometimes called one 
another cousins, and that was all that they had to say on the sub- 
ject. But they were as intimate as brothers, and when William 
Burke went to mend his broken fortunes in India, Edmund Burke 
commended him to Philip Francis — then fighting his deadly duel 
of tive years with Warren Hastings at Calcutta — as one whom he 
had tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with in an 
union not to be expressed, quite since their boyish years. '' Look- 
ing back to the course of my life," he wrote in 1771, " I remember 
no one considerable benefit in the whole of it which I did not, 
mediately or immediately, derive from William Burke." There is 
nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering this intimacy 
and the community of purse and home which subsisted among the 
three Burkes, in the theory that when Edmund Burke bought his 
property in Buckinghamshire, he looked for help from the specula- 
tions of Richard and William. However this may have been, from 
them no help came. Many years afterwards (1783), Lord Verney 
filed a bill in Chancery claiming from Edmund Burke a sum of 
6000/., which he alleged that he had lent at the instigation of Wil- 
liam Burke to assist in completing the purcliase of Beaconsfield. 
Burke's sworn answer denied all knowledge of the transaction, and 
the plaintiff did not get the relief for which he had prayed. 

In a letter to Shackleton (May r, 1768) Burke gave the follow- 
ing account of what he had done : — *' I have made a push," he 
nays, " with all I could collect of my own, and tlie aid of my friend.s, 
to Cast a little root in this country. I have purchased a house, 
with an estate of about six liundred acres of land, in Buckingham- 
shire, twenty-four miles from London. It is a place exceedingly 
pleasant ; and I propose, God willing, to become a farmer in good 
earnest. You who are classical will not be displeased to know that 
it was formerly the seat of Waller, the poet, whose house, or part 
of it, makes at present the farm-house within an hundred yards of 
rne." The details of the actual purchase of Beaconsfield have 
been made tolerably clear. The price was twenty-two thousand 
pounds, more or less. Fourteen thousand were left on mortgage, 
which remained outstanding until the sale of tlie property by Mrs. 
Burke in 1812. Garret* Burke, tlie elder brother, had shortly be- 
fore the purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and this 
bequest is rather conjecturally estimated at two thousand pounds. 
The l^alance of six thousand was advanced by Lord Rockingham on 
Burk.-'s bond. 

The purchase after all was the smallest part of the matter, and 
it still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was able to maintain 
so handsome an establishment, but how he could ever suppose it 
likely that he would be able to maintain it. He coimted, no doubt, 
on making some sort of income by farming, but then he might well 



BUKKE. 29 

have known that an absorbed politician would hardly be able, as 
he called it, to turn farmer in good earnest. For a short time he 
received a salary of seven hundred pounds a year as agent for 
New York. We may perhaps take for granted that he made as 
much more out of his acres. He received sometliingfrom Dodslcv 
for his work on the Annual Register down to 1788. But wiien all 
these resources have been counted up, we cannot but see the gulf 
of a great yearly deficit. The unhappy truth is that from the mid- 
dle of 1769, when we find hini applying to Garrick for the loan of a 
thousand pounds, down 10 1794, when the king gave him a pension, 
lUirke was never free from the harassing strain of debts and want 
of money. It has been stated with good show cf authority, that 
his obli'^ations to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than 
tliirtv thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (17^2), with a 
<.eneVosity which is not the less honourable to him for having been 
So richly earned by the faithful friend who was the Object of it, he 
left instructions to his executors that all Burke's bonds should be 

We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts that all 
this had been otherwise. But those who press it as a reproach 
against Burke's memory may be justly reminded that when Pitt 
died, after drawing the pay of a minister for twenty years, he left 
debts to the amount of forty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have 
said elsewhere, had none of the vices of profusion, but he had that 
quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues— the noble 
mean of Ma^rnificence, standing midway between the two extremes 
of vulgar osfaitation and narrow pettiness. At least, every credi- 
tor wa% paid in good time, and nobody suffered but himself. Those 
who think these disagreeable matters of supreme importance, and 
allow such things to stand between them and Burke's greatness are 
like the people— slightly to alter a figure from a philosopher of o.d 
—who, vvhen they went to Olympia, could only perceive that they 
were scorched bv the sun, and pressed by the crowd, and deprived 
of comfortable nieans of bathing, and wetted by the rain and that 
life was full of disagreeable and troublesome th^^gf , ^"^ ,«o t'ley 
almost forcrot the great colossus of ivory and gold Phidias s s atue 
of Zeus, which they had come to see, and winch stood m all Us 
dory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision. 

there have been few men in history with whom personal objects 
counted for so lutle as they counted with Burke. He if Ij ^^'^ 
what so many public men only feign to do. He forgot that he had 
any interests of his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of 
the party with which he acted, and from those ot the wliole nation 
for which he held himself a trustee. WhU Wiliam Burke said o 
him in 1766 was true throughout his life-- Ned is full of real 
business, intent upou doing solid good to his country as much as 
if he was to receive twenty per cent, from the Empire. ^ Such me., 
as the shrewd and impudent Rigby atoned for a plebeian origin by 
the arts of dependence and a judicious servility and drew more of 
the public money from the pay office in half-a-dozen quarter-days 



30 



BURKE. 



than Burke received in all bis life. It was not by such arts that 
Burke rose. When we remember all the untold bitterness of the 
struggle in which he was engaged, from the time when the old 
Duke of Newcastle fned to make the Marquis of Rockingham 
dismiss his new priva j secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise 
(1765), down to the W\\\t when the Duke of Bedford, himself bat- 
tening '• in grants to the house of RusseJ, S) enormous as not only 
to outrage economy, but even to stagger ^credibility," assailed the 
government forgiving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost 
imagine that if Johnson had imitated the famous Tenth Satire a 
little later, he would have been tempted to apply the poet's cynical 
criticism of the career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own dav^ 
'-• I was not," Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, " like his 
Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legisla- 
tor; Nitor in adversujn\-~> the motto for a man like me. I pos- 
ses^sed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that 
rec'ommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was 
not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade 
of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the 
people. At every step of my progress in life, for in every step was 
I traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I met I was obliged 
to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to 
the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was 
not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its 
interests l)oth abroad and at home • otherwise no rank, no toleration 
even for me," 



BURKE. 31 



CHAPTER III. 

THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE, 

Foreign' observers of our affairs looked upon the state oi Eng- 
land between I...C accession of George III. and ; le loss of the 
American colonies (i 760-1 776), with mixed disgust and salisfaciion. 
Their instinct as absolute rulers was revolted by a spectacle of un- 
bridled faction and raging anarchy ; their envy was soothed by the 
growing weakness of a power which Chatham had so short a time 
before left at the highest point of grandeur and strength. Fred- 
erick the Great spoke with contempt of the insolence of Opposi- 
tion and the virulence of parties ; and vowed that, petty German 
prince as he was, he would not change places with the King of 
England. The Emperor Joseph pronounced positively *:hat Great 
Britain was declining, that Parliament was ruining itself, and that 
the colonies threatened a catastrophe. Catherine of Russia thought 
that nothing would restore its ancient vigour to the realm, short of 
the bracing and heroic remedy of a war. Even at home, such 
shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpole suspected 
ihat the state of the country was more serious than it had been 
since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to be approaching by 
fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men who remembered their 
Roman history, fancied that they saw every svmptom of confusion 
that preceded the ruin of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire 
uneasily what was. the temper of the army. Men who remembered 
the story of the violence and insatiable factiousness of Florence, 
turned again to Macchiavelli and to Guicciardini. to trace a parallel 
between the fierce city on the Arno and the fierce city on the 
Thames. When the King of Sweden, in 1772. carried out a revolu- 
tion, by abolishing an oligarchic council and assuming the powers 
of a dictator, with the assent of his people, there were act\ia11y 
serious men in England who thought that the English, after having 
been guilty of every meanness and corruption, would soon, like the 
Swedes, own themseh s unworthy to be free. The Duke of Rich- 
mond, who happened t' have a claim to a i')eerage and an estate in 
France, excused himself for taking so much ].')ains to establish his 
claim to them, by gravely askin*^ who knew that a time might not 
soon come when England would not be worthy living in, and when 
a retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a free man to 
have ? 



32 BURKE. 

The reign had begun by a furiou.s outbreak of hatred between 
the English and the Scotch. Lord Bute had been driven from 
office, not merely because he was supposed to owe his power to a 
scandalous friendship with the King's mother, but because he was 
accused of crowding the public service with his detested countrymen 
from the other side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval 
of his policy than from rude prejudice against his country. The 
flow of angry emotion had not subsided before the whisper of strife 
jn the American colonies began to trouble the air ; and before that 
had waxed loud, the Middlesex election had blown into a porten- 
tous hurricane. This was the first great constitutional case after 
Burke came into the House of Commons. As, moreover, it became 
a leading element in the crisis which was the occasion of Burke's 
first remarkable essay in the literature of politics, it is as well cOgo 
over the facts. 

The Parliament to which he had first been returned, now ap- 
proaching the expiry of its legal term, was dissolved in the spring 
of 1768. Wilkes, then an outlaw in Paris, returned to England, 
and announced himself as a candidate for the City. When the 
election was over, his name stood last on the poll. But his ancient 
fame as the opponent and victim of the court five years before were 
revived. After his rejection in the City, he found himself strong 
enough to stand for the county of Middlesex. Here he was returned 
at the head of the poll after an excited election. Wilkes had been 
tried in 1764, and found guilty by the King's Bench of republishing 
Number Yo\\.\-^\Q.oi\\\& North Briton, and of printing and publish- 
ing the Essay on Woman. He had not appeared to receive sentence, 
and had been outlawed in consequence. After his election for 
Middlesex, he obtained a reversal of his outlawry on the point of 
technical form. He then came up for sentence under the original 
verdict. The court sent him to prison for twenty-two months, and 
condemned him to pay a fine of a thousand pounds. 

Wilkes was in prison when the second session of the new Par- 
liament began. His case came before the House in November, 
1768, on his own petition, accusing Lord Mansfield of altering the 
record at his trial. After manv acrimonious debates and examina- 
tions of Wilkes and others at the bar of the House, at length, by 
21Q votes ac:ainst 136. the famous motion was passed which ex- 
pelled him from the House. Another election for Middlesex was 
held, and Wilkes was returned without opposition. The day afttr 
the return, the House of Commons resolved, by an immense ma- 
jority, that, having been expelled, Wilkes was incapable of serving 
in that Parliament. The following month Wilkes was once more 
elected. The House once more declared the election void. In 
April another election took place, and this time the Government 
put forward Colonel Luttvel. who vacated his seat for Bossiney for 
the purpose of opposing: Wilkes. There was the same result, and 
for the fourth time Wilkes was at the head of the poll. The House 
ordered the return to be altered, and after hearing by counsel the 
freeholders of Middlesex who petitioned against the alteration. 



nUKKE. 33 

fin )lly confirmed it (Mav 8, 1760) by a maiority of 221 to 152. Ac- 
coidincr to Lord Temple, this was the greatest majority ever known 
on the last dav of a session. 

The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceeding.'; 
need little interpretation. The House, according to the authorities, 
had a constitutional right to expel Wilkes, though the grounds on 
wliich even this is defended would probably be questioned if a 
imilar case were to arise in our own day. But a single branch of the 
l-fjislalure could have no power to pass an incapacitating vote eithc'- 
ag'iinst Wilkes or anybody else. An Act of Parliament is the least 
ii?strument by which such incapacitv couid be imposed. The House 
might perhaps expel Wilkes, but it' could not either legally, or with 
regard to the less definite limits of constitutional morality, decide 
whom the Middlesex freeholders should not elect, and it could not 
therefore set aside their representative, who was then free from any 
disabling quality. Lord Camden did not much exaggerate, when 
he declared in a debate on the subject in the House of Lords, that 
the judgment passed upon the Middlesex election had given the 
constitution a more dangerous wound than any which were given 
during the twelve years' absence of Parliament in the reign of 
Ciiarles L The House of Commons was usurping_ another form 
of that very dispensing power, for pretending to which the last of 
the Stuart sovereigns "had lost his crown. If the House by a vote 
could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, what legal or constitutional 
impediment would there be in the way, if the majority were at any 
time disposed to declare all their most formidable opponents in the 
minority incapable of sitting "? 

In the same I^ariiament, there was another and scarcely less 
remarkable case of Privilege, "that eldest son of Prerogative," as 
Burke truly called it, "and inheriting all the vices of its parent," 
Certain printers were accused of breach of privilege for reporting 
the debates of the House (March, 1771). The messenger of the 
serjeant-at-arms attempted to take one of them into custody in hia 
own shop in the City. A constable was standing by, designedly, it 
has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the messenger into 
his custody for an assault. The case carne on before the Lord 
Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alderman Oliver, the same evening, 
and the result was that the messengerof the House was committed. 
The City doctrine was, that if the House of Commons had a ser- 
jeant-at-arms, they had a serjeant-at-mace. If the House of Com- 
mons could send their -citizens to Newgate, they could send it.s 
messenger to the Compter. Two other printers were collusivtly 
arrested, brought before Wilkes and Olivei; and at once liberated. 

The Commons instantly resolved on stem rnr ures. The Lord 
Mayor and Oliver were taken and dispatched to the Tower, where 
they lay until die prorogation of Parliament. Wilkes stubbornly 
refused to pav any attention to repeated summon^e~ to attend 
at the bar of tne House, very properly insisting that heo-ight to be 
summoned to attend /// his place as Member for Micdlesex. Be- 
sides committing Crosby and Oliver to the Tower, the House 

3 



• ^ BURKE. 

summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend with his books, and 
then and there forced liiin t tvike out the record of the recogni- 
sances into which their n, ^-r had entered on being committed 
at the Mansion House, 1 . mart ever did anything more abitrary 
an I illegal. The House deliberately intended' to constitute itself, 
as Ikirke had sa-d two years before, an arbitrary and despotic as- 
sembly. " The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of 
apprehension and redress in the last century. In this, the distem- 
pers of Parliament." 

Jiurke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 1771, warned 
the House of the evils of the course upon which they were 
entering, and declared those to be their mortal enemies who would 
persuade them to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, 
independent of the people, and unconnected with their opinions and 
feelings. But these mortal enemies of its very constitution were at 
this time the majority of the House. It was to no purpose that 
Burke argued with more than legal closeness that incapacitation 
could not be a power according to law, inasmuch as it had neither 
of the two properties of law : it was not known., " you yourself not 
knowing upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any 
man : " and it was im'i fixed, because it was varied according to the 
occasion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could call 
for it as a right. A strain of unanswerable reasoning of this kind 
counted for nothing, in spite of its being unanswerable. Despotic 
/)r oligarchic pretensions are proof against the most iormidai)le 
battery that reason can experience can construct against them. 
And Wilkes's exclusion endured until this Parliament — the Unre- 
ported Parliament, as it was called, and in many resi:)ects the very 
worst that ever assembled at Westminster — was dissolved, and a 
new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned for 
Middlesex, and took his seat. 

The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the 
town had been harassed by disorder. Of the fierce l}rutality of the 
crowd of that age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching 
pencil of Hogarth. Barbarous laws were cruelly administered. 
The common people were turbulent, because misrule made them 
miserable. Wilkes had written filthy verses, but the crowd cared 
no more for this than their betters cared about the vices of Lord 
Sandwich. They made common cause with one who was accident- 
ally a more conspicuous sufferer. Wilkes was quite right when he 
vowed that he was no Wilkite. The masses were better than their 
leader. "Whenever the people have a feeling," Burke onse said, 
"they commonly are in the right: they sometimes mistake the phy- 
sician," Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that 
if George ^TL had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a good 
one, the latter '-"^ight have turned the former out of the kingdom ; 
for the turbulence that began in street riots at one time threatened 
to end in revolt. The King liimself was attacked with savage in- 
vective in papers of which it was said, that no one in the previous" 



BURKE. 



:.5 



century would have dared to print any like them until Charles was 
fast locked up in Carisbrooke Castle. 

As is usual when the minds of tbo«;e in power have been infected 
witli an arbitrary temper, the empl()\ment of military force to crush 
civil disturlmnces became a familiar and favourite idea. The mili- 
tary, said Lord Weymouth, in an elaborate letter which he addressed 
to the Surrey magistrates, can never be employed to a more con- 
stitutional purpose than in the support of the authority and dignity of 
the magistracy. If the magistrate should be menaced, he is cau- 
tioned not to delay a moment in calling for the military, and making 
use of them effectually. The consequence of this bloody scroll, 
as Wilkes rightly called it, was that shortly afterwards an affray 
occurred between the crowd and the troops, in which some twenty 
people were killed and wounded (May lo, 1768). On the following 
day, the Secretary of War, Lord Harrington, wrote to the command- 
ing officer, informing him that the King highly approved of the con- 
duct both of officers and men, and wished that his gracious appro- 
bation of them should be communicated to them. 

Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion for a 
Committee of Inquiry, supported by one of tlie most lucid and able 
of his minor speeches. " If ever the time should come," he con- 
cluded, •' when this House shall be found prompt to execute and 
slow to inquire ; ready to punish the excesses of the people, and 
slow to listen to their grievances ; ready to grant supplies, and 
slow to examine the account ; ready to invnss't magistrates with 
large powers, and slow to inquire into the exercise of them ; ready 
to entertain notions of the military power as incorporated with the 
constitution — when you learn this in the air of St. James's, then the 
business is done ; then the House of Commons will change that 
character which it receives from the people only." It is hardly 
necessary to say that his motion for a committee was lost by the 
overwhelming majority of two hundred and forty-five against thirty. 
The general result of the proceedings of the government from the 
accession of George III. to the beginning of the troubles in the 
American colonies, was in Burke's own words, that the government 
was at once dreaded and contemned; that the laws were despoiled 
of all tlieir respected and salutary terrors ; that their inaction was 
a subject of ridicule, and their exertion of abhorrence ; that our de- 
pendencies had slackened in their affections ; that we knew neither 
how to yield nor how to enforce ; and that disconnection and con- 
fusion, in offices, in parties, in families, in Parliament, in the nation, 
prevailed bayoncl the disorders of any former time. 

It was in the pamphlet on the Present Discontents, published 
in 1770. that Burke dealt at large with the whole scheme of policy 
of which all these irregularities were the distempered incidents. 
The pam]:)hlet was composed as a manifesto of the Rockingham 
section of tlie Whig party, to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how 
different it was in spirit and composition from ''the Bedfords, the 
Grenvilles, and other knots, who are combined for no public pur- 
pose, but only as a means of furthering with joint strength their 



36 BURKE. 

private and individual advantage." TIic pamplilet was submitted 
in manuscript or proof to the heads of the party. Friendly critics 
excused some inelegancies which they thought they found'in occa- 
sional passages, by taking for granted, as was true, that he had ad- 
mitted insertions from other hands. Here for the first time he ex- 
hibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest quahties of his un- 
derstanding. Contemporaries had an opportunity of measuring this 
strength, by comparison with another performance of similar scope. 
The letters of Junius had startled the world the year before. Burke 
was universally suspected of being their author, and the suspicion 
never wholly died out so long as he lived. There was no real 
ground for it beyond the two unconnected facts, that the letters 
were powerful letters, and that Burke had a powerful intellect. 
Dr. Johnson admitted that he had never had a better reason for 
believing that Burke was Junius, than that he knew nobody else 
who had the ability of Junius. But Johnson discharged his mind 
of the thought, at the instant that Burke voluntarily assured him 
that he neither wrote the lettersof Junius nor knew who had written 
them. The subjects and aim of those famous pieces were not very 
different from Burke's tract, but any one who in our time turns from 
the letters to the tract will wonder howtiie author of the one could 
ever have been suspected of writing the other. Junius is never 
more than a railer, and very often he is third-rate even as a railer. 
The author of the P7-esent Discontents speaks without bitterness 
even of Lord Bute and the Duke of Grafton; he only refers to 
persons, when theirconductor their situation illustrates a principle. 
Instead of reviling, lie probes, he reflects, he warns ; and as the 
result of this serious method, pursued by a man in whom close 
mastery of detail kept exact pace with wide grasp of generalities, we 
have not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one of the monu- 
mental pieces of political literature. 

The last great pamphlet in the history of English jDublic affairs had 
been Swift's tract On the Conduct of the Allies (171 1), in which the 
writer did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his day 
than Burke did for the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pam- 
phlet is close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes ; but 
nobody need read it to-day, except tlie historical student, or a mem- 
ber of the Peace Society, in searcli of the most convincing ex- 
posure of the most insane of Englisli wars.* There is not a sen- 
tence in it which does not belong exclusively to the matter in hand : 
not a line of that general wisdom which is for all time. In the 
Present Discontents the method is just the opposite of this. The 
details are slurred, and they are not hteral. Burke describes with 
excess of elaboration how the new system is a system of double 
cabinets ; one put forward with nominal powers in Parliament, the 
other concealed behind the throne, and secretly dictating the 
policy. The reader feels that this is worked out far too closely to 
be real. It is a structure of artificial rhetoric. But we lightly 

* This was not Burke's judgment on the long war against Louis XIV. See Regicidi 
Peace, i' 



BURKE. 



pass this over, on our way to more solid matter ; to the exposition 
of the prmciples of a constitution, the right methods of statesman- 
ship, and the defence of party. 

_ It was IJolingbroke, and not Swift, of whom Burke was think- 
ing, when he sat down to the composition of his tract The Pa- 
triot Kin^ was the fountain of the new doctrines, whiclivBurke 
trained his party to understand and to resist. If his foe was do- 
mestic, It was from a foreign armoury that Burke derived the instru- 
ments of resistance. The great fault of political writers is their 
too close adherence to the forms of the system of state which thev 
happen to be expounding or examining. They stop short at the 
anatomy of institutions, and do not penetrate to the secret of their 
functions. An illustrious author in the middle of the ei<rhteenth 
century introduced his contemporaries to a better way. U is not 
too much to say that at that epoch the strength of political specula- 
tion in this country, from Adam Smith downwards, was drawn from 
iM-ance; and Burke had been led to some of what was most char- 
acteristic in his philosophy of society by Montesquieu's Spirit ot 
Zrt^wj- (1748), the first great manual of the historic school We 
have no space here to work out the relations between Montesquieu's 
principles and Burke's, but the student of the Esprit des Lois will 
recognise its influence in every one of Burke's masterpieces. 

i;>o tar as immediate events were concerned, Burke was nuick 
to discern their true interpretation. As has been already said he 
attributed to the King and his party a deliberateness of s sJe m 
which probably had no real existence in their minds. The Kin. in 
tended to reassert the old right of choosing his own m n st^^s 

Dose he began, "who think that the people are neve wmn° 

them andthri J/l): //. 1 say that in all disputes between 

faZuro/^^^^^ /^^ /-..«...//.... /. at least upon a par in 

Iroin.r further Whl ^'^>': ^^Pe'-'ence perhaps justifies him in 

TMnc? K. ^''f" P^P"'''^'' cliscontents are prevalent %on-,<,. 

1^^:^!^^^''' 'Tt ''^"■■^^'" '''' col.stitut"i'ort.e 
luministration. I he people have no interest in disorder When 

aZf^ZlT^^ '' '' '^'''' ^'-'"^'""'^"^^ "«^^heir crime." And then he 
uTrZl ir"' ^""''^-^ ^'"^•^ ^'^e Memoirs of Sully which bo h 
t^ eir n'J'^^'^'?""^ '"^ ^""^'"'''^^ students should^'bk^^ a o 
o lu ons'thlf "^ ''''[' "'^°'^ *'^^ t'-^Wes of their hearts : "The rev- 
olutions that come to pass in great states are not the result of 



38 BURKE. 

chance, nor of popular caprice. ... As for the populace, it is 
never from a passion for attack that it rebels, but from impatience 
of suffering." 

What really gives its distinction to the Present Discontents is 
not its plea for indulgence to popular impatience, nor its plea for 
the superiority of government by aristocracy, but rather the pres- 
ence in it of the thought of Montesquieu and his school of the 
necessity of studying political phenomena in relation, not merely to 
forms of government and law, but in relation to whole groups of 
social facts which give to law and government the spirit that makes 
them workable. Connected with this, is a particularly wide inter- 
pretation and a particularly impressive application of the maxims 
of expediency, because a wide conception of the various interact- 
ing elements of a society naturally extends the considerations 
which a balance of expediencies will include. Hence, in time, 
there came a strong and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his 
breadth of vision, his flexibilit),- of temper, his hardlv measurable 
influence. These are the principal thoughts in the Discontents to 
which that tract owes its permanent interest. " Whatever origi- 
nal energy," says Burke, in one place, " may be supposed either 
in force or regulation, the operation of both is in truth merely in- 
strumental. Nations are governed by the same methods, and on 
the same principles, by which an individual without authority is 
often able to govern those who are his equals or superiors ; by a 
knowledge of their temper and by a judicious management of it 
.... The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute Government 
how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon 
the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the prudence 
and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency 
of the laws dependo upon them. Without them, your Common- 
wealth is no better than a scJienie upon paper j and not a liinng, 
active, effective constitntiony Thus early in his ]uiblic career had 
Burke seized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured 
in the long and ever memoral)le episode of his war against the 
French Revolution: the opposition between artificial arrangements 
in politics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by 
what he calls elsewhere in the present tract, the natural strength 
of the kingdom, and suitable to the temper and mental habits of 
the poeple. When he spoke of the natural strength of the king- 
dom, he gave no narrow or conventional account of it. He in- 
cluded in the elements of that strength, besides the great peers 
and the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manu- 
facturers, and the substantial yeomanrv. Contrasted with the trite 
versions of government as fixed in King, Lords, and Commons, 
this search for the real organs of power was going to the root of 
the matter in a spirit at once thoroughly scientific and thoroughly 
practical. Burke had, by the speculative training to which he had 
submitted himself in dealing with Bolingbroke, prepared his mind 
for a complete grasp of the^idea of the "body politic as a complex 
growth, a manifold whole, with closely interdependent relations 



BURKE. 35 

among its several parts and divisions. It was this conception from 
which his conservatism sprang. Revolutionary politics have one 
of their sources in the idea that societies are capable of infinite 
and immediate modifications, without reference to the deep-rooted 
conditions that have worked themselves into every part of the 
social structure. 

The same opposition of the positive to the doctrinaire spirit is 
to be observed in the remarkable vindication of Party, which fills 
the last dozen paij^es of the pamphlet, and which is one of the most 
courageous of all Burke's deliverances. Party combination is 
exactiy one of those contrivances which, as it might seem, a wise 
man would accept for working purposes, but about which he would 
take care to say as little as possible. There appears to be some- 
thing revolting to the intellectual integrity and self-respect of the 
individual, in the systematic surrender of his personal action, inter- 
est, and power, to a political connexion in which his own judgment 
may never once be allowed to count for anything. It is like 
the surrender of the right of private judgment to the authority of 
the Church, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic doc- 
trine. Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare logical reason. 
But Burke cared nothing about the bare logical reason, until it had 
been clothed in convenience and custom, in the affections on one 
side, and experience on the other. Not content with insisting 
that for some special purpose of the hour, " when bad men combine, 
the good must associate," he contended boldly for the merits of 
fidelity to party combination in itself. Although Burke wrote these 
strong pages as a reply to Bolingbroke, who had denounced party 
as an evil, they remain as the best general apology that has ever 
been offered for that principle of public action, against more phil- 
osophic attacks than Bolingbroke's. Burke admitted that when he 
saw a man acting a desultory and disconnected part in public life 
with detriment to his fortune, he was ready to believe such a man 
to be in earnest, though not ready to believe him to be right. In 
any case he lamented to see rare and valuable qualities squandered 
away witht)ut any public utility. He admitted, moreover, on the 
other hand, that people frequently acquired in party confederacies 
a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit. " But where duty ren- 
ders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our business to keep 
free from the evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situa- 
tion itself. It is surely no very rational account of a man that he 
has always acted right ; but has taken special care to act in such a 
manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any 
consequence. . . . When men are not acquainted with each other's 
principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all prac- 
tised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts of 
business ; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common in- 
terest subsisting among them ; it is evidently impossible that they 
can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy." 

In terms of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred reverence 
with which the Romans used to regard i\\t7iecessitudo sortis, or the 



40 BURKE. 

relations that grew up between men who had only held office to- 
gether by the casual fortune of the lot. He pointed out to emula- 
tion the Whig junto who held so close together in the reign of 
Anne — Sunderland, Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough — who 
believed "that no men could act with effect who did not act in con- 
cert ; that no men could act in concert who did not act with confi- 
dence ; and that no men could act with confidence who were not 
bound together by common opinions, common affections, and com- 
mon interests." In reading these energetic passages we have to 
remember two things : first, that the writer assumes the direct 
object of party combination to be generous, great, and liberal 
causes ; and, second, that when the time c^rne, and when he be- 
lieved that his friends were espousing a wrong and pernicious 
cause, Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the seven green 
witheS; broke away from the friendships of a life, and deliberately 
broke his party in pieces.* 

When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders of 1770, 
he insisted on contenting himself with what he ought to have known 
to be obviously inadequate prescriptions. And we cannot help 
feeling that he never speaks of the constitution of the government 
of this country without gliding into a fallacy identical with that 
which he himself described and denounced, -as thinking better of 
the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserved. 
He was uniformly consistent in his view of the remedies which the 
various sections of Opposition proposed against the existing debase- 
ment and servility of the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond 
wanted universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual par- 
liaments. Wilkes proposed to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to 
increase the county constituencies, and to give members to rich, 
populous, trading towns — a general policy which was accepted fifty- 
six years afterwards. The Constitutional Society desired frequent 
]:)ar]iaments, the exclusion of placemen from the House, and the 
increase of the county representation. liurke uniformly refused to 
give his countenance to any proposals such as these, which involved 
a clearly organic change in the constitution. He confessed that he 
had no sort of reliance upon either a triennial parliament or a 
place-bill, and with that reasonableness which as a rule was fully 
as remarkable in him as his eloquence, he showed very good 
grounds for his want of faitli in the popular specifics. . In truth, 
triennial or annual parliaments could have done no good, unless 
the change had been accompanied by the more important process 
of amputating, as Chatham called it, the rotten boroughs. Of these 
the Crown could at that time reckon some seventy as its own prop- 
erty. Besides those which belonged to the Crown, there was 
also the immense number which belonged to the Peerage. If tlie 
King sought to strengthen an administration, the thing needful 
was not to enlist the services of able and distinguished men, but to 
conciliate a duke, who brought with him the control of a given 

* See on the same subject, Corresp. ii. 276-7. 



BURKE. 41 

quantity of voting power in the Lower House. All this patrician 
intiuence, which may be found at the bottom of most of the 
intrigues of the period, would not have been touched by curtailing 
the duration of parliaments. 

What then was the remedy, or had Burke no remedy to offer 
for these grave distempers of Parliament ? Only the remedy of 
the interposition of the body of the people itself. We must beware 
of interpreting this phrase in the modern democratic sense. In 
1766 he had deliberately declared that he thought it would be more 
conformable to the spirit of the constitution, "by lessening the 
number, to add to the weight and independency of our voters.' 
'• Considering the immense and dangerous charge of elections, the 
prostitute and daring venality, the corruption of manners, the idle- 
ness and profligacy of the lower sort of voters, no prudent man 
would propose "to increase such an evil." * In another place he 
denies that the people have either enough of speculation in the 
closet, or of experience in business, to be competent judges, not of 
the detail of particular measures only, but of general schemes of 
policy.] On Burkes theory, the people, as a rule, were no more 
concerned to interfere with Parliament, than a man is concerned to 
interfere with somebody whom he has voluntarily and deliberately 
made his trustee. But here, he confessed, was a shameful and 
ruinous breach of trust. The ordinary rule of government was be- 
ing every day mischievously contemned and daringly set aside. 
Until the confidence thus outraged should be once more restored, 
then the people ought to be excited to a more strict and detailed 
attention to the conduct of their representatives. That meetings of 
counties and corporations ought to settle standards for judging 
more systematically of the behaviour of those whom they had sent 
to Parliament. Frequent and correct lists of the voters in all im- 
portant questions ought to be procured. The severest discourage- 
ment ought to be given to the pernicious practice of affording a 
blind and undistinguished support to every administration. " Par- 
liamentary support comes and goes with office, totally regardless 
of the man or the merit." For instance, W^ilkes's annual motion to 
expunge the votes upon the Middlesex election had been uniformly 
rejected, as often as it was made while Lord North was in power. 
Lord North had no sooner given way to the Rockingham Cabi 
net, than the House of Commons changed its mind, and the resolu- 
tions were expunged by a handsome majority of 115 to 47. Ad- 
ministration was omnipotent in the House, because it could be a 
man's most efficient friend at an election, and could most amply 
reward his fidelity afterwards. Against this system Burke called 
on the nation to set astern face. Root it up, he kept crying ; settle 
the general course in which you desire members to go; insist that 
they shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from this by the 
authority of the government of the day; let lists of votes be pub- 
lished, so that you may ascertain for yourselves whether your 

* Observatiotts on late State of the Nation^ Works, i. 105, b. 
t Speech on Duration 0/ Parliaments. 



42 BURKE. 

trustees have been faithful or fraudulent ; do all this, and there will b4 
no need to resort to those organic changes, those empirical innova 
tions, which may possibly cure, but are much more likely to de- 
stroy. 

It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have given deep 
displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of those whose only 
common bond was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy 
to the court, the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House 
of Commons. The Constitutional Society was furious. Lord 
Chatham wrote to Lord Rockingham that the work in which these 
doctrines first appeared must do much mischief to the common 
cause. But Burke's view of tlie constitution was a part of his be- 
lief with which he never paltered, and on which he surrendered his 
judgment to no man. " Our constitution," in his opinion, " stands 
on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all 
sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one 
side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other."* This 
image was ever before his mind. It occurs again in the last sen- 
tence of that great protest against all change and movement, when 
he describes himself as one who, when the equipoise of the vessel 
in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one 
side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that 
which may preserve its equipoise. f When we think of the odious 
misgovernment in England which the constitution permitted, be- 
tween the time when Burke wrote and the passing of Lord Sid- 
mouth's Six Acts fifty years later, we may be inclined to class such 
a constitution among the most inadequate and mischievous political 
arrangements that any free country has ever had to endure. Yet 
"rt was this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial 
reverence. " Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into the ket- 
tle of any magician, in order to boil it with the puddle of their com- 
pounds into youth and vigour: on the contrary, I will drive away 
such pretenders ; 1 will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient 
arts extend a parent's breath." 

He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the arguments, 
which have always marked the champion of faith and authority 
against the impious assault of reason or innovation. The constitu- 
tion was sacred to him as the voice of the Church and the oracles 
of her saints are sacred to the fathful. Study it, he cried, until vou 
know how to admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, raiher 
believe that you are dull, than that the rest of the world has been 
imposed upon. We ought to understand it according to our meas- 
ure, and to venerate where we are not able presently to compre- 
hend. Well has Burke been called the Bossuet of politics. 

Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for the con- 
stitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, may now seem 
clearly excessive, as it did to Chatham and his son, who were great 
men in the right, or to Beckford and Sawbridge, who were very 

* Presefit Disct>nte7its. t Reflection on the French Revolution. 



BURKE. 4^ 

little men in the right, we can only be just to him by comparing his 
itlcas with those wliich were dominant throughout an evil reign. 
While he opposed more frequent parliaments, he still upheld the 
doctrine that *'to govern according to the sense, and agreeable to 
the interests, of the people is a great and glorious object of govern- 
ment." While he declared himself against the addition ofahun- 
dred knights of the shire, he in the very same breath protested that, 
though the people might be deceived in their choice of an object, 
he "■ could scarcely conceive any choice they could make, to be so 
very mischievous as the existence of any human force capable of 
resisting it." * To us this may seem very mild and commonplace 
doctrine, but it was not commonplace in an age when Anglican 
divines— men like Archbishop Markham, Dr. Nowell, or Dr. 
Porteous — had revived the base precepts of passive obedience and 
non-resistance, and when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged 
them. And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had 
been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing 
farces, and while Grey was a schoolboy. 

It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vindication 
of the supremacy of popular interests over all other considerations 
would have been bootless toil, and that the great constitutional 
struggle from 1760 to 1783 would have ended otherwise than it 
did, but for the failure of the war against the insurgent colonies, 
and the final establishment of American Independence. It was 
this portentous transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and 
despotic pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, 
and which put an end to the hopes entertained by the sovereign of 
making his personal, will supreme in the Chambers. Fox might 
well talk of an early Loyalist victory in the war, as the terrible 
news from Long Island. The struggle which began unsuccessfully 
at Brentford in Middlesex, was continued at Boston in Massa- 
chusetts. The scene had changed, but the conflicting principles 
were the same. The war of Independence was virtually a second 
English civil war. The ruin of the American cause would have 
been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England ; and a 
patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry 
and George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. 
Burke's attitude in this great contest is that part of his history 
a(-)out the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least 
dispute. 

* To the Chairman 0/ the ^ucRinghamshire Meeting, 1780. 



^4 BURKE, 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY — PARIS— ELECTION AT BRISTOL — THE 
AMERICAN WAR. 

The war with the American colonies was preceded by an inter- 
val of stupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the 
nation by the affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election was 
followed, as Burke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. 
In 1770 the distracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an 
end, and was succeeded by that of Lord North. The King had 
at last triumphed. He had secured an administration of which 
the fundamental principle was that the sovereign was to be the 
virtual head of it, and the real director of its counsels. Lord 
North's government lasted for twelve years, and its career is for 
ever associated with one of the most momentous chapters in the 
history of the English nation and of free institutions. 

Through this long and eventful period, Burke's was as the 
voice of one crying in the wilderness. He had become important 
enough for the ministry to think it worth while to take pains to 
discredit him. They busily encouraged the report that he was 
Junius, or a close ally to Junius. This was one of the minor vex- 
ations of Burke's middle life. Even his friends continued to tor- 
ment him for incessant disclaimers. Burke's lofty pride made hira 
slow to deal positively with what he scorned as a malicious and 
unworthy imputation. To such a friend as Johnson he did not, as 
we have seen, disdain to volunteer a denial, but Charles Townshend 
was forced to write more than one importunate letter before he 
could extract from Burke the definite sentence (Nov. 24, 1771): 
" I now give you my word and honour that I am not the author of 
Junius, and that I know not the author of that paper, and I do 
authorise you to say so." Nor was this the only kind of annoy- 
ance to which he was subjected. His rising fame kindled the can- 
dour of the friends of his youth. With proverbial good-nature, 
they admonished him that he did not bear instruction ; that he 
showed such arrogance as in a man of his condition was intoler- 
able ; that he snapped furiously at his parliamentary foes, like a 
wolf who had broken into the fold ; that his speeches were useless 
declamations ; and that he disgraced the House by the scurrilities 
of the bear-garden. These sharp chastenings of friendship Burke 



BURKE. 



45 



endured with the perfect self-command, not of the cold and in- 
different egotist, but of one who had trained himself not to ex- 
pect too much from men. Pie ix)ssessed the true solace for all 
l)rivate chagrins in the activity and the fervour of his public in- 
terests. 

In 1772 the affairs of the East India Company, and its relations 
with the Government, had fallen into disorder. The Opposition, 
though powerless in the Houses of Parliament, were often able to 
tlnvart the views of the ministry in the imperial board-room in 
Leadcnhall Street. The Duke of Richmond was as zealous and 
as active in his opposition to Lord North in the business of the 
East Indies as he was in the business of the country at West- 
minster. A proposal was made to Burke to go out to India at the 
head of a commission of three supervisors, with authority to ex. 
amine the concerns of every department, and full powers of control 
over the company's servants. Though this offer was pressed by 
tlie directors, Burke, after anxious consideration, declined it. 
What his reasons were, there is no evidence; we can only guess 
that he thought less of his personal interests than of those of the 
country and of his party. Without him the Rockingham connexion 
would undoubtedly have fallen to ruin, and with it the most upright, 
consistent, and disinterested body of men then in public life. 
"You say," the Duke of Richmond wrote to him (Nov. 15, 1772), 
'•the party is an object of too much importance to go to pieces. 
Indeed, Burke, you have more merit than any man in keeping us 
together," It was the character of the party, almost as much as 
tlieir principles, that secured Burke's zeal and attachment; their 
decorum, their constancy, their aversion to all cabals for private ob- 
jects, their indifference to office, except as an instrument of power 
and a means of carrying out the policy of their convictions. They 
might easily have had office, if they would have come in upon the 
King's terms. A year after his fall from power. Lord Rockingham 
was summoned to the royal closet, and pressed to resume his post. 
But office at any price was not in their thoughts. They knew the 
penalties of their system, and they clung to it undeterred. Their 
patriotism was deliberate and considered, Chalcedon was called 
the city of the blind, because its founders wilfully neglected the 
more glorious site of Byzantium which lay under their eyes. "We 
have built our Chalcedon," said Burke, "with the chosen part of 
the universe full m our prospect." They had the faults to which 
an aristocratic party in op])osition is naturally liable. Burke used 
to reproach them with being somewhat languid, scrupulous, and 
unsystematic. He could not make the Duke of Richmond put ofi 
a large party at Goodwood for the sake of an important division in 
the House of Lords; and he did not always agree with Lord John 
Cavendish as to what constitutes a decent and reasonable quantity 
of fox-hunting for a political leader in a crisis. But it was part of 
the steadfastness of his whole life to do his best with such materials 
as he could find ; he did not lose patience nor abate his effort, be- 
cause his friends would miss the opportunity of a great political 



46 BURKE. 

stroke, rather than they would miss Newmarket Races. He wrote 
their protests for the House of Lords, composed petitions for 
county meetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with informa- 
tion, ideas, admonitions, and exhortations. Never before nor since 
has our country seen so extraordinary a union of the clever and 
indefatigable party-manager, with the reflective and philosophic 
habits of the speculative publicist. It is much easier to make 
either absolutism or democracy attractive than aristocracy ; yet we 
see how consistent with his deep moral conservatism was Burke's 
attachment to an aristocratic party, when we read his exhortation 
to the Duke of Richmond to remember that persons in his high 
station of life ought to have long views. " You people," he writes 
to the Duke (November 17, 1772). "of great families and heredi- 
tary trusts and fortunes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever 
we may be, by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we 
bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the ground, we 
belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still 
>ve are but annual plants that perish with our season, and leave no 
sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, 
are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate 
your benefits from generation to generation. The immediate 
power of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham, is 
not so much of moment ; but if their conduct and example hand 
down their principles to their successors, then their houses become 
the public repositories and office of record for the constitution. . . . 
I do not look upon your time or lives as lost, if in this sliding 
away from the genuine spirit of the country, certain parties, if pos- 
sible — if not, the heads of certain families — should make it their 
business by the whole course of their lives, principally by their 
example, to mould into the very vital stamina of their descendants, 
those principles which ought to be transmitted pure and unmixed 
to posterity." 

Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described le5vs as 
reflection than as imagination — moral, historic, conservative imagi- 
nation — in which order, social continuity, and the endless projection 
of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with 
tlie sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting 
duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to 
group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, 
and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like 
Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a false 
dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the 
sporting squires of his party were as much the representatives of 
ancestral force and quality, as in older days were long lines of 
Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a profound 
instinct, in part pohtical, but in greater part moral. The accidental 
roughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol was 
glorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass of his imagi- 
nation. 

With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke made a jour- 



BURKE 4^ 

ney to France. It was almost as though the solemn hicropluint of 
some mystic Egyptian temple should have found himself amid tlie 
brilliant chatter of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of 
the garden or the porch at Athens. His only son had just fm- 
ished a successful school-course at Westminister, and was now 
entered a student at Christ Church. He was still too young for 
the university, and Burke thought that a year could not be more 
profitably spent than in forming his tongue to foreign languages. 
The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the house of the business agent 
of the Bishop of Auxerre. From the Bishop he received many 
kindnesses, to be amply repaid in after-years when the Bishop 
came in his old age, an exile and a beggar, to England. 

While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct liimself 
as to what was going on in French society. If he had not the 
flazzling reception which had greeted Hume in 1764, at least he had 
ample opportunities of acquainting himself with the prevailing ideas 
fii the times, in more than one of the social camps into which Paris 
was then divided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choi- 
seul that though he speaks French extremely ill, everybody felt 
that he would be infinitely agreeable if he could more easily make 
himself understood. He followed French well enough as a lis- 
tener, and went every day to the courts to hear the barristers and 
watch the procedure. Madame du Deffand showed him all pos- 
sible attention, and her friends eagerly seconded her. She invited 
him to supper parties where he met the Count de Broglie, the 
agent of the king's secret diplomacy ; Caraccioli, successor of the 
nimble-witted Galiani as minister from Naples ; and other notabil- 
ities of the high world. He supped with the Duchess of Lux- 
embourg, and h.eard a reading of La Harpe's Bannecides. It was 
high treason in this circle to frequent the rival salon of Made- 
moiselle Lespinasse but either the law was relaxed in the case of 
foreigners, or else Burke kept his own counsel. Here were for the 
moment the headquarters of the party of innovation, and here he 
saw some of the men who were busily forging the thunderbolts. 
His eye was on the alert, now as always, for anything that might 
light up the sovereign problems of human government. A book, 
by a member of this circle, had appeared six months before, which 
was still the talk of the town, and against which the government 
had taken the usual important measures of repression. This was 
the Treatise on Tactics, by a certain M. de Guibert, a colonel of 
the Corsican legion. The important part of the work was the in- 
troduction, in which the writer examined with what was then 
thought extraordinary hardihood, the social and political causes of 
the decline of the military art in France. Burke read it with keen 
interest and energetic approval. He was present at the reading of 
a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence to the rival 
coterie by preferring Guibert's tragedy to La Harpe's. To us, 
however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedy 
nor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could 
open a book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, 



48 BURKE. 

and then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word. 
He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion of 
Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so unique in their consuming 
intensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page oni 
which they are written. It was, perhaps, at Mademoiselle Les- 
pinasse's that Burke met Diderot. The eleven volumes of th« 
illustrative plates of the Encyclopccdia had been given to the pul> 
lie twelve months before, and its editor was just released from the 
giant's toil of twenty years. Voltaire was in imperial exile at Fer- 
ney. Rousseau was copying music in a garret in the street which 
is now called after his name, but he had long ago cut himself off 
from society ; and Burke was not likely to take much trouble to 
find out a man whom he had known in England seven years before, 
and against whom he had conceived a strong and lasting antipathy, 
as entertaining no principle either to influence his heart or to guide 
his understanding save a deranged and eccentric vanity. 

It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. 
They saw the dauphin and his brothers dine in public, before a 
crowd of princes of the blood, nobles, abbes, and all the miscel- 
laneous throng of a court. They attended mass in the chapel, 
where the old King, surrounded by bishops, sat in a pew just above 
that of Madame du Barri. The royal mistress astonished foreign- 
ers by hair without powder and cheeks without rouge, the simplest 
toilettes, and the most unassuming manners. Vice itself, in 
Burke's famous words, seemed to lose half its evil by losing all its 
grossness. And there, too, Burke had that vision to which we owe 
one of the most gorgeous pages in our literature — Marie Antoinette, 
the young dauphiness, " decorating and cheering the elevated 
sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning-star, 
full of lite and splendour and joy." The shadow was rapidly steal- 
ing on. The year after Burke's visit, the scene underwent a strange 
transformation. The King died ; the mistress was banished in 
luxurious exile ; and the dauphiness became the ill-starred Queen 
of France. Burke never forgot the emotions of the scene ; they 
awoke in his imagination sixteen years after, when all was changed, 
and the awful contrast shook him with a passion that his eloquence 
has made immortal. 

Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had 
been so well received, that he ought to leave France excellently 
pleased with the country. But it was not so. His spirit was per- 
turbed by what he had listened to. He came away with small es- 
teem for that busy fermentation of intellect in which his French 
friends most exulted, and for which they looked forward to the 
grati:ude and admiration of posterity. From the spot on which he 
stood there issued two mighty streams. It was from the ideas of 
the Parisian Freethinkers whom Burke so detested, that Jefferson, 
Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of human society which 
were so soon to find life in American Independence. It was from 
the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surged forth, 
in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but only a 



BURKE. 



49 



horrid torrent of red and desolating lava. In 1773 there was a 
moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break of 
stillness that precedes the hurricane. It was, indeed, the eve of a 
momentous epoch. Before sixteen years were over, the American 
Republic had risen like a new constellation into the firmament, 
and the French monarchy, of such antiquity and f ♦ ne and high 
pre-eminence in European history, had been shattered to the dust. 
We may not agree with Burke's appreciation of the forces that 
were behind these vast convulsions. But at least he saw, and saw 
with eyes of passionate alarm, that strong speculative forces were 
at work, which must violently prove the very bases of the great 
social superstructure, and might not improbably break them up for 
ever. 

Almost immediately after his return from France, he sounded a 
shrill note of warning. Some Methodists from Chatham had peti- 
tioned Parliament against a bill for the relief of Dissenters from 
subscription to the Articles. Burke denounced the intolerance of 
the petitioners. It is not the Dissenters, he cried, whom you have 
to fear, but the men who, " not contented with endeavouring to 
turn your eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which life 
and immortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the Gospel, would 
even extinguish that faint glimmering of Nature, that only comfort 
supplied to ignorant man before this great illumination. . . These 
are the people against whom you ought to aim the shaft of the 
law ; these are the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of 
government, I would say, 'You shall not degrade us into brutes.' 
. . , The most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil 
society is through atheism. . . .The infidels are outlaws of the 
constitution, not of this country, but of tlie human race. They are 
never, never to be supported, never to be tolerated. Under the 
systematic attacks of these people, I see some of the props of good 
government already begin to fail ; I see propagated principles 
which will not leave to religion even a toleration. I see myself 
sinking every day under the attacks of these wretched people."* 
To this pitch he had been excited by the vehement band of men, 
who had inscribed on their standard Ecraser Vlnfaine. 

The second Parliament in which Burke had a seat was dissolved 
suddenly and without warning (October, 1774). The attitude of 
America was threatening, and it was believed the Ministers were 
anxious to have the elections over before the state of things be- 
came worse. The whole kingdom was instantly in a ferment. 
Couriers, chaises, post-horses turried in every direction over the 
island, and it was noted, as a measure of the agitation, that no 
fewer than sixty messengers passed through a single turnpike on 
one day. Sensible observers were glad to think" that, in conse- 
quence of the rapidity of the elections, less wine and money would 
be wasted than at any election for sixty years past. Burke had a 

• speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773. 



^o BURKE. 

houseful of company at Beaconsfield when the news arrived. John* 
son was among them, and as the party was hastily breaking up, 
the old Tory took his Whig friend kindly by the hand : " Farewell, 
my dear sir," he said, " and remember that I wish you all the sue 
cess that ought to be wished to you, and can possibly be wished to 
you, by an honest man." 

The words were of good omen. Burke was now rewarded by 
the discovery that his labours had earned for him recognition and 
gratitude beyond the narrow limits of a rather exclusive party. He 
had before this attracted the attention of the mercantile public. 
The Company of Merchants trading to Africa voted him their 
thanks for his share in supporting their estabhshments. The Com- 
mittee of Trade at Manchester formally returned him their grate- 
ful acknowledgments for the active part that he had taken in the 
business of the Jamaica free ports. But then Manchester returned 
no representative to Parhament. In two Parliaments Burke had 
been elected for Wendover free of expense. Lord Verney's cir- 
cumstances were now so embarrassed, that he was obliged to part 
with the four seats at his disposal to men who could pay for them. 
There had been some talk of proposing Burke for Westminster, and 
Wilkes, who was then omnipotent, promised him the support of 
the popular party. But the patriot's memory was treacherous, and 
he speedily forgot, for reasons of his own, an idea that had origi- 
nated with himself. Burke's constancy of spirit was momentarily 
overclouded. "Sometimes when I am alone," he wrote to Lord 
Rockingham (September 15, 1774), "in spite of all my efforts, I 
fall into a melancholy which is inexpressible, and to which, if I 
gave way, I should not continue long under it, but must totally 
sink. Yet I do assure you that partly, and indeed principally, by 
the force of natural good spirits, and partly by a strong sense of 
what I ought to do, I bear up so well that no one who did not know 
them could easily discover the state of my mind or my circum- 
stances. I have those that are dear to me, for whom I must live 
as long as God pleases, and in what way he pleases. Whether I 
ought not totally to abandon this public station for which I am so 
unfit, and have of course been so unfortunate, I know not." But 
he was always saved from rash retirement from public business by 
two reflections. He doubted wh.ether a man has a right to retire 
after he has once gone a certain length in these things. And he 
remembered that there are often obscure vexations in the most 
private life, which as effectually destroy a man's peace as anything 
that can occur in public contentions. 

Lord Rockingham offered his influence on behalf of Burke at 
Malton, one of the family boroughs in Yorkshire, and thither Burke 
in no high spirits betook himself. On his way to the north he 
heard that he had been nominated for Bristol, but the nomination 
had, for certain electioneering reasons, not been approved by the 
party. As it happened, Burke was no sooner chosen at Malton 
than, owing to an unexpected turn of affairs at Bristol, the idea of 
proposing him for a candidate revived. Messengers were sent 



BUR 



511 



express to his house in London, and, not finding him there, they 
hastened down to Yorkshire. Burke quickly resolved that the 
offer was too important to be rejected. Bristol was the capital of 
the west, and it was still in wealth, population, and mercantile ac- 
tivity tlie second city of the kingdom. To be invited to stand for 
so great a constituency, without any request of his own and free of 
personal expense, was a distinction which no politician could hold 
lightly. Burke rose from the table where he was dining with some 
of his supporters, stepped into a post-chaise at six on a Tuesday 
evening, and travelled without a break until he reached Bristol on 
the Thursday afternoon, having got over two hundred and seventy 
miles in forty-four hours. Not only did he execute the journey 
without a break, but, as he told the people of Bristol, with an ex- 
ulting commemoration of his own zeal that recalls Cicero, he did 
not sleep for an instant in the interval. The poll was kept open 
for a month, and the contest was the most tedious that had ever 
been known in the city. New freemen were admitted down to the 
very last day of the election. At the end of it, Burke was second 
on the poll, and was declared to be duly chosen (November 3, 
1774). There was a petition against his return, but the election 
was confirmed, and he continued to sit for Bristol for six years. 

The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man's weaker 
places. Burke stood the test. He shov\ed none of the petulant 
rage of those clamorous politicians whose flight, as he said, is winged 
in a lower region of the air. As the traveller stands on the noble 
bridge that now spans the valley of the Avon, he may recall 
Burke's local comparison of these busy, angry familiars of an 
election, to the gulls that skim the mud of the river when it is ex- 
hausted of its tide. He gave his new friends a more important 
lesson, when the time came for him to tliank them for the honour 
which they had just conferred upon him. His colleague had 
opened the subject of the relations between a member of Parlia- 
ment and his constituents ; and had declared that, for his own 
part, he should regard the instructions of the people of Bristol as 
decisive and binding. Burke in a weighty passage upheld a man- 
lier doctrine. 

" Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a 
representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, 
and the most unreserved communication "\\ith his c(jnstituents. Their 
wishes ought to have great weight with him ; their opinions high respect, 
their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, 
his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs ; and above all, ever, and \\\ al/ 
cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his 
mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to 
you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes 
you, not his industry only, but his judgment ; and he betrays, instead of 
serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. 

" [\Iy worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. 
If thai be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will 
upon any side, you.-s, without question, (jught to be superior. But govern* 



52 - URKE. 

ment and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of in- 
clination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination pre* 
cedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another 
decide, and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hun- 
dred miles distant from those who hear the arguments? . . . Authori- 
tative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly 
and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for, though contrary to the 
clearest convictions of his judgment and conscience — these are things 
utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a founda- 
mental mistake of the whole order and tenour of our Constitution."* 

For six years the British electors were content to be rep- 
resented by a man of this independence. They never, however, 
really acquiesced in the principle that a member of Parliament 
owes as much to his own convictions as to the will of his con- 
stituents. In 1778 a bill was brought into Parliament, relaxing 
some of the restrictions imposed upon Ireland by the atrocious 
fiscal policy of Great Britain. The great mercantile centres raised 
a furious outcry, and Bristol was as blind and as boisterous as 
Manchester and Glasgow. Burke not only spoke and voted in 
favour of the commercial propositions, but urged that the proposed 
removal of restrictions on Irish trade did not go nearly far 
enough. There was none of that too familiar casuistry, by which 
public men argue themselves out of their conscience in a strange 
syllogism, that they can best serve the country in Parliament ; that 
to keep their seats they must follow their electors ; and that there- 
fore, in the long run, they serve the country best by acquiescing in 
ignorance and prejudice. Anybody can denounce an abuse. It 
needs valour and integrity to stand forth against a wrong to which 
our best friends are most ardently committed. It warms our hearts 
to think of the noble courage with which Burke faced the blind 
and vile selfishness of his own supporters. He reminded them 
that England only consented to leave to the Irish, in two or three 
instances, the use of the natural faculties which God had given 
them. He asked them whether Ireland was united to Great Brit- 
ain for no other purpose than that we should counteract the bounty of 
Providence in her favour; and whether, in proportion as that 
bounty had been liberal, we were to regard it as an evil to be met 
with every possible corrective ? In our day there is nobody of 
any school who doubts that Burke's view of our trade policy to- 
wards Ireland was accurately, absolutely, and magnificently right. 
I need not repeat the arguments. They made no mark on the 
Bristol merchants. Burke boldly told them that he would rather 
run the risk of displeasing than of injuring them. They implored 
him to become their advocate. '' I should only disgrace myself." 
he said, "I should lose the only thing which can make such abili- 
ties as mine of any use to the world now or hereafter. I mean 
that authority which is derived from the opinion that a member 
speaks the language of truth and sincerity, and that he is not ready 

* speech at tfie conclusion of the Poll. 



to take up or lay clown a great political system for the convenience 
of the hour; that he is in Parliament to support his opinion of the 
public good, and does not form his opinion in order to get into 
Parliament or to continue in it." * 

A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not more dis- 
tasteful to the electors of Bristol, than a small instalment of toler- 
ation to Roman Catholics in England. A measure was passed 
(1778) repealing certain iniquitous penalties created by an act of 
William the Third. It is needless to say that this rudimentary 
concession to justice and sense was supported by Burke. His 
voters began to believe that those vvere right who had said that he 
had been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Pnpist at heart, and a Jesuit 
in disguise. When the time came, sununa dies ei iiicliictabile fa- 
tiim, Burke bore with dignity and temper his dismissal from the 
only independent constituency that lie ever represented. Years 
before he had warned a young man entering public life to regard 
and wish well to the common people, whom Iris best instincts and 
his highest duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little 
trust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes an honest 
public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict against the pas- 
sions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons 
than passions and prejudices of our own. 

The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol 
saw this conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances. 
They were the years of the civil war between the English at home 
and the English in the American colonies. George III. and Lord 
North have been made scapegoats for sins which were not exclu- 
sively their own. They were only the organs and representatives 
of all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the entire 
community. Burke discloses in many places, that for once the 
King and Parliament did not act without the sympathies of the 
mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, he Avas rebuking 
the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for the support of 
the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code. " It is but too 
true," he said in a passage worth remembering, " that the love, and 
even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but 
too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is 
made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel them- 
selves in a state of thraldom ; they imagine that their souls are 
cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body 
of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one 
below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all ; and 
a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his 
sliare of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his gen- 
erosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is 
able to keep his chaplain from a gaol. This disposition is the true 
source of the passion which many men, in very humble life, have 
taken to the American war. Our subjects in America ; 02ir col- 
onies • our dependents. This lust of party power is the liberty 

* I'lvo tetters to gentlemen in Bristol, 1778 



54 



BURKE. 



they hunger and thirst for-, and this Siren song of ambition has 
charmed ears that we would have thought were never organised to 
that sort of music." 

This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, and it 
was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants 
on the other side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic ap- 
preciation of the crisis. The insurgents, while achieving their own 
freedom, were indirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people 
of the mother country as well. Burke had a vehement correspondent 
who wrote to him (1777) that if the utter ruin of this country were to 
be the consequence of her persisting in the claim to tax America, 
then he would be tlie first to say. Let her perish ! If England pre- 
vails, said Horace VValpole, English and American liberty is at end ; 
if one fell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, "cer- 
tainly never could and never did wish," as he says of himself, " the 
colonists to be subdued by arms. He was fully persuaded that if 
such should be the event, they must be held in that subdued state 
by a great body of standing forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. 
He was strongly of opinion that such armies, first victorious over 
Englislimen, in' a conflict for English constitutional rights and 
privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep 
an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal 
in the "end to the liberties of England itself." * The way for this 
remote peril was being sedulously prepared by a widespread deteri- 
oiation among popular ideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which 
they had previously gained in the public mind. In order to prove 
that the Americans had no right to their liberties, we were every 
day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole 
spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be 
free, we were obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself. The 
material stt^ength of the Government, and its moral strength alike, 
would have been reinforced by the defeat of the colonists, to such 
an extent as to have seriously delayed or even jeopardised English 
progress, and therefore that of Europe too. As events actually 
fell out, the ferocious administration of the law in the last five or 
six years of the eighteenth century, was the retribution for the 
lethargy or approval with which the mass of the English community 
had watched the measures of the government against their fellow- 
Englishmen in America. 

It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely through the 
successive stages of parliamentary action in the American war. 
He always defended the settlement of 1766; the Stamp Act was 
repealed, and the constitutional supremacy and sovereign authority 
of the mother country was preserved in a Declaratory .Act. When 
the project of taxing the colonies was revived, and relations with 
them were becoming strained and dangerous, Burke came forward 
with a plan for leaving the General Assemblies of the colonies to 
grant supplies and aids, instead of giving and granting supplies in 
Parliament, to be raised and paid in the colonies. Needless to say 

Appeal from the New to the old WhigS' 



BrA-A:r 5j 

that it was rejected, and perhaps it was not feasible. Henceforth 
I^iirke could only watch in impotence the blunders of government, 
.and the disasters that befell the national arms. But' his protests 
a.^ainst the war will last as long as our literature. 

Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqualified and 
unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this momentous 
struggle : the Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774); the 
Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775); and the 
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (r777). Together they hardly ex- 
ceed the compass of the little volume which the reader now has in 
his hands. It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most 
perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for one who 
approaches the study of public affairs, whether for knovvledsje or 
for practice. They are an example without fault of all the qualities 
which the critic, whether a theorist or an actor, of great political sit- 
uations should strive by night and by day to possess. If the sub- 
ject v/ith which they deal were less near than it is to our interests 
and affections as free citizens, these three performances would still 
abound in the lessons of an incomparable political method. If their 
.subject were as remote as the quarrel between the Corinthians and 
Corcyra, or the war between Rome and the Allies, instead of a con- 
flict to which the world owes the opportunity of the most important 
of political experiments, we should still have everything to learn 
from the author's treatment : the vigorous grasp of masses of com- 
pressed detail, the wide illumination from great principles of human 
experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great po- 
litical ends of Justice and Freedom, the large and generous inter- 
pretation of expediency, the iriorality, the vision, the noble temper. 
If ever, in the fulness of time— and surely the fates of men and 
literature cannot have it otherwise— Burke becomes one of the 
half-dozen names of established and universal currency in education 
and in common books, rising above the waywardness of literary ca- 
price or intellectual fashions, as Shakespere and Wilton and Bacon 
rise above it. it will be the mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of 
these far-shining discourses in which the world will in an especial 
degree recognise the combination of sovereign gifts with beneficent 
uses. 

The pamphlet on the Present Discontents is partially obscured 
or muffled to the modern reader by the space which is g'iven to the 
cabal of the day. The Reflections on the French Revolution over- 
abounds in declamation, and — apart from its being passionately on 
one side, and that perhaps the wrong one— the splendour of the 
eloquence is out of proportion to the reason and the judgment. 
In the pieces on the American War, on the contrary, Burke was 
conscious that he could trust nothing to the sympathy or the pre- 
possessions of his readers, and this put him upon an unwonted per- 
suasiveness. Here it is reason and judgment, not declamation ; 
lucidity, not passion ; that produces the effects of eloquence. No 
choler mars the page ; no purple patch distracts our minds from 
the penetrating force of the argument ; no commonplace is dressed 



56 BURKE. 

up into a va^iie sublimity- The cause of freedom is made to wea< 
its own proper robe of equity, self-control, and reasonableness. 

Not one, but all those great idols of the political market-place 
whose worship and service has cost the race so dear, are discov- 
ered and shown to be the foolish uncouth stocks and stones that 
they are. Fox once urged members of parliament to peruse the 
.•■jjeech on Concihation again and again, to study it, to imprint it on 
their minds, to impress it on their hearts. But Fox only referred to 
the lesson which he thought to be contained in it, that representa- 
tion is the sovereign remedy for every evil. This is by far the least 
important of its lessons. It is great in many ways. It is greatest 
as a remonstrance and an answer against the thriving sophisms of 
barbarous national pride, the eternal fallacies of war and conquest ; 
and here it is great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, 
because they expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults 
of heart and temper, as well as of understanding, which move 
nations to haughty and violent courses. 

The great argument with those of the war party who pretended 
to a political defence of their position was the doctrine that the 
English government was sovereign in the colonies as at home ; 
and in the notion of sovereignty they found inherent the notion of 
an indefeasible right to impose and exact taxes. Having satisfied 
themselves of the existence of this sovereignty and of the right 
which they took to be its natural property, "they saw no step be- 
tween the existence of an abstract right and the propriety of en- 
forcing it. We have seen an instance of a similar mode of politi- 
cal thinking in our own lifetime. During the great cival war 
between the Northern and Southern States of the American 
Union, people in England convinced themselves — some after 
careful examination of documents, others by cursory glances at 
second hand authorities — that the South had a right to secede. 
The current of opinion was precisely similar in the struggle to 
v.'hich the United States owed their separate existence. Now the 
klea of a right as a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be wor- 
shipped in a state of naked divorce from expediency and con- 
venience, was one that Burke's political judgment found preposter- 
ous and unendurable. He hated the arbitrary and despotic savour 
which clung about the English assumptions over the colonies. 
And his repulsion was heightened when he found that these 
assumptions were justified, not by some permanent advantage 
which their victory would procure for the mother country or for the 
colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such a victory ; 
not by the assertion and demonstration of some positive duty, but 
by the futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to do 
something or other, if we liked. 

The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied in a 
withdrawal of the just claim of the government, instead of convinc- 
ing, only exasperated him. " Show the thing you contend for to 
be reason ; show it to be common-sense ; show' it to be the means 
of attaining some useful end; and then I am content to allow it 



BURKE. 



57 



\vliat dignity you please." * The next year lie took up tlie ground 
still more firmly, and explained it still more impressively. As for 
the question of the right of taxation, he exclaimed, " It is less than 
nothing in my consideration. . . . My consideration is narrow, 
confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question. I do 
not examine whether the giving away a man's money be a power 
excepted and reserved out of the general trust of Government. 
. . . The question with me is not whether yon have a right to 
render yoiir people miserable, bnt whether it is not yoicr interest 
to make them hapPy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, 
but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I oiight to do. I 
am not determining a point of law ; I am restoring tranquillity, and 
the general character and situation of a people must determine 
what sort of government is fitted for them." " 1 am not here going 
into tlie distinctions of rights," he cries, "not attempting to mark 
their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinc- 
tions, I kite the very sonnd of them. This is the true touchstone 
of all theories which regard man and the affairs of man : does it 
suit his nature in general.-* does it suit his nature as modified by 
his habits?" He could not bear to think of having legislative or 
political arrangements shaped or vindicated by a delusive geometri- 
cal accuracy of deduction, instead of being entrusted to " the 
natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, generally 
fall into their proper order." 

Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that man acts 
from adequate motives relative to his interests, and not on meta- 
physical speculations, Burke sows, as he marches along in his 
stately argument, many a germ of the modern philosophy of civil- 
isation. He was told that America was worth fighting lor. "Cer- 
tainly it is," he answered, " if fighting a people be the best way of 
gaining them." Every step that has been taken in the direction 
of progress, not merely in empire, but in education, in punishment, 
in the treatment of the insane, has shown the deep wisdom, so un- 
familiar in that age of ferocious penalties and brutal methods, of 
this truth — that "the natural effect of fidelity, clemency, kindness 
in governors, is peace, good-will, order and esteem in the governed." 
Is there a single instance to the contrary .? Then there is that sure 
key to wise politics : " Nobody shall persnade me, when a whole 
people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of concilia- 
tion.'" And that still more famous sentence, '^ I do not know the 
method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. 

Good and observant men will feel that no misty benevolence 
or vague sympathy, but the positive reality of experience, inspired 
such passages as that where he says, " Never expecting to find 
perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created 
beings, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found 
much human virtue. The age unquestionably produces daring 
profligates and insidious hypocrites ? What then .? Am I not to 
avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world, because 

* Sj>eec It on American Taxation. 



58 



BURKE. 



of the mixture of evil that is in it! . . . Those who raise suspi- 
cious of the good, on account of the behaviour of evil men, are of 
the party of the latter. ... A conscientious person would rather 
doubt his own judgment, than condemn his species. He that ac- 
cuses all mankind of corruption, ought to remember that he is sure 
to convict only one. In truth, I should much rather admit those 
whom at any time 1 have disrelished the most, to be patterns of per- 
fection, than seek a consolation to my own unworthiness in a general 
communion of depravity with all about me." This is one of those 
pieces of rational constancy and mental wholeness in Burke, which 
fill up our admiration for him — one of the manifold illustrations of 
an invincible fidelity to the natural order and operation of things, 
even when they seemed most hostile to all that was dear to his 
own personality. 



BURKE. 59 



CHAPTER V. 

ECONOMICAL REFORM— BURKE IN OFFICE— FALL OF HIS PARTY. 

Towards 1780 it began to be clear that the ministers had 
brought the country into disaster and humiliation, from which their 
policy contained no way of escape. In the closing months of the 
American war, the Opposition pressed ministers with a vigour that 
never abated. Lord North bore their attacks with perfect good- 
humour. When Burke, in the course of a great oration, parodied 
Burgoyne's invitation to the Indians to repair to the King's stan- 
dard, the wit and satire of it almost suffocated the prime minister, 
not with shame but with laughter. His heart had long ceased to be 
in the matter, and everybody knew that he only retained his post in 
obedience to the urgent importunities of the King, whilst such col- 
leagues as Rigby only clung to their place because the salaries were 
endeared by long familiarity. The general gloom was accidentally 
deepened by that hideous outbreak of fanaticism and violence, 
which is known as the Lord George Gordon Riots (June, 1780). 
The Whigs, as having favoured the relaxation of the laws against 
popery, were especiaTly obnoxious to the mob. The government 
sent a guard of soldiers to protect Burke's house in Charles Street, 
St. James's ; but, after he had removed the more important of his 
papers, he insisted on the guard being dispatched for the protec- 
tion of more important places, and he took shelter under the roof 
of General Burgoyne. His excellent wife, according to a letter of 
his brother, had " the firmness and sweetness of an angel ; but 
why do I say of an angel ? — of a woman." Burke himself coui- 
ageously walked to and'fro amid the raging crowds with firm com- 
posure, though the experiment was full of peril. He describes the 
mob as being made up, as London mobs generally are, rather of 
the unruly and dissolute than of fanatical malignants, and he vehe- 
mently opposed any concessions by Parliament to the spirit of in- 
tolerance which had first kindled the blaze. All the letters of the 
time show that the outrages and alarms of those days and nights, 
in which the capital seemed to be at the mercy of a furious rabble, 
made a deeper impression on the minds of contemporaries than 
they ought to have done. Burke was not likely to be less excited 
than others by the sight of such insensate disorder ; and it is no 
idle fancy that he lad the mobs of 1780 still in his memory, when 
ten years later he poured out the vials of his wrath on the bloodier 



6o BURKE. 

mob which carried the King and Queen of France in wild triumph 
from Versailles to Paris. 

In the previous February (1780) Burke had achieved one of 
the greatest of all his parliamentary and oratorical successes. 
Though the matter of this particular enterprise is no longer alive, 
yet it illustrates his many strong qualities in so remarkable a way 
that it is right to give some account of it. We have already seen 
that Burke steadily set his face against parliamentary reform ; he 
habitually declared that the machine was well enough to answer any 
good purpose, provided the materials were sound. The statesman 
who resists all projects for the reform of the constitution, and yet 
eagerly proclaims how deplorably imperfect are the practical results 
of its working, binds himself to vigorous exertions for the amend- 
ment of administration. Burke devoted himself to this duty with 
a fervid assiduity that has not often been exampled, and has never 
been surpassed. He went to work with the zeal of a religious en- 
thusiast, intent on purging his church and his faith of the corruptions 
which lowered it in the eyes of men. There was no part or order 
of government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, as to escape 
his acute and persevering observation. 

Burke's object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, was 
less to husband the public resources and relieve the tax-payer — 
though this aim could not have been absent from his mind, over- 
burdened as England then was with the charges of the American 
war — than to cut off the channels which supplied the corruption of 
the House of Commons. The full title of the first project which 
he presented to the legislature (February, 1780), was A Plan for 
the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the 
Economical Reformation of the Civil and other Establishments. 
It was to the former that he deemed the latter to be the most di- 
rect road. The strength of the administration in the House was 
due to the gifts which the Minister had in his hands to dispense. 
Men voted with the side which could reward their fidelity. It was 
the numl^er of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which, 
along with the controllable influence of peers and nabobs, fur- 
nished the Minister with an irresistible lever : the avarice and the 
degraded public spirit of the recipients supplied the required ful- 
crum. Burke knew that in sweeping away these factitious places 
and secret pensions, he would be robbing the Court of its chief im- 
plements of corruption, and protecting the representative against 
his chief motive in selling his country. He conceived that he 
would thus be promoting a far more infallible means than any 
scheme of electoral reform could have provided, for reviving the 
integrity and independence of the House of Commons. In his 
eyes, the evil resided not in the constituencies, but in their rep- 
resentatives ; not in the small number of the one, but in the 
smaller integrity of the other. 

The evil did not vStop where it began. It was not merely ihat 
the sinister motive, thus engendered in the minds of too lax and 
facile men, induced them to betray their legislative trust, and bar* 



BURKE. 6, 

ter their own upriglitness and the interests of the State. The ac 
quisition of one of these nefarious bribes meant much more than a 
sinister vote. It called into existejice a champion of every invet- 
erate abuse that weighed on the resources of the country. There 
is a well-known passage in the speech on Economical Reform, in 
which the speaker shows what an insurmountable obstacle Lord 
Talbot had found in his attempt to carry out certain reforms in the 
royal household, in the fact that the turnspit of the King's kitchen 
was a member of Parliament. " On that rock his whole" adventure 
split — his whole scheme of economy was dashed to pieces ; his de- 
partment became more expensive than ever; the Civil List debt 
accumulated." Interference with the expenses of the household 
meant interference with the perquisites or fees of this legislative 
turnspit, and the rights of sinecures were too sacred to be touched. 
In comparison with them, it counted for nothing that the King's 
tradesmen went unpaid, and became bankrupt; that the judges 
were unpaid; that "the justice of the kingdom bent ancl gave 
way ; the foreign ministers remained inactive and unprovided ; 
the system of Europe was dissolved ; the chain of our alliances 
was broken ; all the wheels of Government at home and abroad 
were stopped. The king's turnspit was a inejnber of Parlia- 
ment.^''* This office, and numbers of others exactly like it, ex- 
isted solely because the House of Commons w-as crowded with 
venal men. The post of royal scullion meant a vote that could be 
relied upon under every circumstance and in all emergencies. 
And each incumbent of such an office felt his honour and interests 
concerned in the defence of all other offices of the same scanda- 
lous description. There was thus maintained a strong standing 
army of expensive, lax, and corrupting officials. 

The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly jobbery and 
purposeless j^rofusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge of a 
Gothic establishment," though all its usage and accommodation 
had "shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance." 
The outlay was enormous. The expenditure on the court tables 
only was a thing unfathomable. Waste was the rule in every 
branch of it. There was an office for the Great Wardrobe, another 
office of the Robes, a third of the Groom of the Stole. For these 
three useless offices there were three useless treasurers. They 
all laid a heavy burden on the tax-payer, in order to supply a bribe 
to the member of Parliament. The plain remedy was to annihilate 
the subordinate treasuries. " Take away," was Burke's demand, 
"the whole establishment of detail in the household: the Treas- 
urer, the Comptroller, the Cofferer of the Household, the Treas- 
urers of the Chamber, the Master of Household, the whole Board 
of Green Cloth ; a vast number of subordinate offices in the de- 
partment of the Steward of the Household ; the whole establish' 

* Tlie Civil List at this time comprehended a great number of charges, such as those 
of wliich Rurke speaks, that had nothing to do with the sovereign personally. They 
Were slovvlv removed, the judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the acces* 
tion of VVilliam VI. 



62 BURKE. 

ment of the Great Wardrobe ; the Removing Wardrobe ; the Jewel 
Office ; the Robes ; the Board of Works." The aboh'tion of this 
confused and costly system would not only diminish expense and 
promote efficiency; it would do still more excellent service in de- 
stroying the roots of parliamentary corruption. " Under other 
governments a question of expense is only a question of economy, 
and it is nothing more ; with us, in every question of expense, 
there is always a mixture of constitutional considerations." 

Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any means 
the only stumbling-block in the way of pure and well-ordered gov- 
ernment. The administration of the estates of the Crown — the 
Principality, the Duchy of Cornwall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the 
County Palatine of Chester — was an elaborate system of obscure 
and unprofitable expenditure. Wales had to herself eight judges, 
while no more than twelve sufficed to perform the whole business 
of justice in England, a country ten times as large, and a hundred 
times as opulent. Wales, and each of the duchies, had its own 
exchequer. Every one of these principalities, said Burke, has the 
apparatus of a kingdom, for the jurisdiction over a few private 
estates ; it has the formality and charge of the Exchequer of Great 
Britain, for collecting the rents of a country squire. They were 
the field, in his expressive phrase, of mock jurisdictions and mimic 
revenues, of difficult trifles and laborious fooleries. " It was but 
the other day that that pert factious fellow, the Duke of Lancaster, 
presumed to fly in the face of his hege lord, our gi-acious sovereign 
• — presumed to go to law with the King. The object is neither 
your business nor mine. Which of the parties got the better I 
really forget. The material point is that the suit cost about 15,000/. 
But as the Duke of Lancaster is but agent of Duke Humphrey, 
and not worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to pay the costs 
of both," The system which involved these costly absurdities, 
Burke proposed entirely to abolish. In the same spirit he wished 
to dispose of the Crown lands and the forest lands, which it was 
for the good of the community, not less than of the Crown itself, 
to throw into the hands of private owners. 

One of the most important of these projected reforms, and one 
which its author did not flinch from carrying out two years later to 
his own loss, related to the office of Paymaster. This functionary 
was accustomed to hold large balances of the i^ublic money in his 
own hands and for his own profit, for long periods, owing to a com- 
plex system of accounts wliich was so rigorous as entirely to defeat 
its own object. The Paymaster could not, through the multiplicity 
of forms and the exaction of impossible conditions, get a prompt 
acquittance. The audit sometimes did not take place for years 
after the accounts were virtually closed. Meanwhile, the money 
accumulated in his hands, and its profits were his legitimate per- 
quisite. The first Lord Holland, for example, held the balances of 
his office from 1765. when he retired, until 1778, when they were 
audited. During this time he realised, as the interest on the use o{ 
these balances, nearly two hundred &nd fifty thousand pounds. 



BURKE. 63 

liuike diverted these enormous gains into the coffers of the state. 
He lixed the Paymaster's salary at four thousand pounds a year, 
and was himself the first person who accepted the curtailed in- 
come. 

Not the most fervid or brilliant of Burke's pieces, yet the Speech 
on Economical Reform is certainly not the least instructive or im- 
pressive of them. It gives a suggestive view of the relations exist- 
ing at that time between the House of Commons and the Court. 
It reveals the narrow and unpatriotic sprit of tiie King and the 
ministers, who could resist proposals so leasonable in themselves, 
and so remedial in their effects, at a time when the nation was 
suffering the heavy and distressing burdens of the most disastrous 
war that our country has ever carried on. It is especially interest- 
ing as an illustration of its author's political capacity. At a mo- 
ment when committees, and petitions, and great county meetings 
showed how thoroughly the national anger was roused against the 
existing system, Burke came to the front of affairs with a scheme, 
of which the most striking characteristic proved to be that it was 
profoundly temperate. Bent on the extirpation of the system, he 
had no ill-will towards the men who had happened to flourish m it. 
" I never will suffer," he said, "any man or description of men to 
suffer from errors that naturally have grown out of the abusive 
constitution of those offices which I propose to regulate. If I can- 
not reform with equity, I will not reform at all." Exasperated as 
he was by the fruitlessness of his opposition to a policy which he 
detested from the bottom of his soul, it would have been little won- 
derful if he had resorted to every weapon of his unrivalled rhetori- 
ical armoury, in order to discredit and overthrow the whole scheme 
of government. Yet nothing could have been further from his 
mind than any violent or extreme idea of this sort. Many years 
afterwards he took credit to himself less for what he did on this 
occasion, than for what he prevented from being done. People 
were ready for a new modelling of the two Houses of Parliament, 
as well as for grave modifications of the Prerogative. Burke re- 
sisted this temper unflinchingly. "I had," he says, "a state to 
preserve, as well as a state to reform. I had a people to gratify, 
b-.it not to inflame or to mislead." He then recounts without ex- 
aggeration the pains and caution with v;hich he sought reform, 
while steering clear of innovation. He heaved the lead every inch 
of way he made. It is grievous to think that a man who could 
assume such an attitude at such a time, who could give this kind of 
proof of this skill in the great, the difficult, art of governing, only 
held a fifth-rate office for some time less than a twelvemonth. 

The year of the project of Economic Reform (1780) is usually 
taken as the date when Burke's influence and repute were at their 
height. He had not been tried in the fire of official responsibility, 
and his impetuosity was still under a degree of control which not 
long afterwards was fatally weakened by an over-mastering irrita- 
bility of constitution. High as his character was now in tlie ascend- 
ant, it was in the same year that Burke suffered the sharp mortifi- 



64 BURKE. 

cation of losing his seat at Bristol. His speech before the election 
is one of the best known of all his performances ; and it well de- 
serves to be so, for it is surpassed b}^ none in gravity, elevation, 
and moral dignity. We can only wonder that a constituency which 
could suffer itself to be addressed on this high level should have 
allowed the small selfishness of local interest to weigh against such 
wisdom and nobility. But Bm-ke soon found in the course of his 
canvas that he had no chance, and he declined to go to the poll. 
On the previous day one of his competitors had fallen down dead. 
" What shadows we are,^ said Burke, "-and what shadows we 
pursue / " 

In 1782 Lord North's government came to an end, and the 
King "was pleased," as Lord North quoted with jesting irony from 
the Gazette, to send for Lord Rockingham, Charles Fox, and Lord 
Shelburne. Members could hardly believe their own eyes, as they 
saw Lord North and the members of a government which had been 
in place for twelve years, now lounging on the opposition benches 
in their great-coats, frocks, and boots, while Fox and Burke shone 
in the full dress that was then worn by ministers, and cut unwonted 
figures with swords, lace, and hair powder. Sheridan was made 
an under-secretary of state, and to the younger Pitt was offered his 
choice of various minor posts, which he haughtily refused. Burke, 
to whom on their own admission the party owed everything, was 
appointed Paymaster of the Forces, with a salary of four thousand 
pounds a year. His brother, Richard Burke, was made Secretary 
of the Treasury. His son, Richard, was named to be his father's 
deputy at the Pay Office, with a salary of five hundred pounds a 
year. 

This singular exclusion from cabinet office of the most powerful 
genius of the party has naturally given rise to abundant criticism 
ever since. It will be convenient to say what there is to be said 
on this subject, in connection with the'events of 17S8 (below, p 
88), because there happens to exist some useful information about 
the ministerial crisis of that year, which sheds a clearer light upon 
the arrangements of six years before. Meanwhile it is enough 
to say that Burke himself had most reasonably looked to some 
higher post. There is the distinct note of the humility of mortified 
pride in a letter written in reply to some one who had applied to 
him for a place. " You have been misinformed," he says ; " I make 
no part of the ministerial arrangement. Something in the official 
line may possibly be thought fit for my measure."' Burke knew 
that his jDOsition in the country entitled him to something above 
the official line. In a later year, when he felt himself called upon 
to defend his pension, he described what his position was in the 
momentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and Burke's habitual vera- 
ciousness forbids us to treat the description as in any way exag- 
gerated. "By what accident it matters not," he say, "nor upon 
what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy 
which has ever pursued me with a full cry through life, I had ob- 
tained a very full degree of public confidence. . . . Nothing 



BURKE. 65 

to prevent disorder was omitted ; when it appeared, nothing to 
subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as I could 
prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so 
aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty 
hand— I do not say I saved my country — I am sure I did my coun- 
try important service. There were few indeed that did not at that 
time acknowledge it — and that time was thirteen years ago. It 
was but one view, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an 
honorable provision should be made for him." * 

We have seen that Burke had fixed the Paymaster's salary 
at four thousand pounds, and had destroyed the extravagant per- 
quisites. The other economical reforms which were actually 
effected fell short by a long way of those which Burke had so in- 
dustriously devised and so forcibly recommended. In 1782, while 
Burke declined to spare his own office, the chief of the cabinet 
conferred upon Barre a pension of over three thousand a year; 
about ten times the amount, as has been said, which, in Lord 
Rockingham's own judgment, as expressed in the nev/ Bill, ought 
henceforth to be granted to any one person whatever. This short- 
coming, however, does not detract from Burke's merit. He was 
not responsiiile for it. The eloquence, ingenuity, diligence, above 
all, the sagacity and the justice of this great effort of 1780, are 
none the less worthy of our admiration and regard because, in 1782, 
his chiefs, partly perhaps out of a newborn deference for the feel- 
ings of their royal master, showed that the possession of office 
had sensibly cooled the ardent aspirations proper to Opposition. 

The events of the twenty months between the resignation of 
Lord North (1782) and the accession of Pitt to the office of Prime 
Minister (December, 1783) mark an important crisis in political 
history, and they mark an important crisis in Burke's career and 
hopes. Lord Rockingham had just been three months in office 
when he died (July, 1782). This dissolved the bond that heid the 
two sections of the ministry together, and let loose a flood of rival 
ambitions and sharp animosities. Lord Shelburne believed him- 
self to have an irresistible claim to the chief post in the adminis- 
tration ; among other reasons, because he might have had it before 
Lord Rockingham three months earlier, if he had so chosen. The 
King supported him, not from any partiality to his person, but because 
he dreaded and hated Charles Fox. Hie character of Shelburne 
is one of the perplexities of the time. His views on peace and free 
trade make him one of the precursors of the Manchester School. No 
minister was so well informed as to the threads of policy in foreign 
countries. He was the intimate or the patron of men who now stood 
cut as among the first lights of that time — of Morellet, of Priestley, 
of Bentham. Yet a few months of power seem to have disclosed 
faults of character which left him without a single political friend, 
and blighted him with irreparable discredit. Fox, who was now 
the head of the Rockingham section of the Whigs, had, before the 
death of the late premier, been on the point of refusing to serve 

* Letter to a Noble Lord. 



66 BURKE. 

any longer with Lord Shelburne, and he now very promptly refused 
to serve under him. When Parliament met after Rockingham's 
death, gossips noticed that Fox and Burke continued, long after the 
Speaker had taken the chair, to walk backwards and forwards in the 
Court of Requests, engaged in earnest conversation. According to 
one story, Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose 
emoluments were as convenient to him as to his spendthrift col- 
league. According to another, and more probable legend, it was 
Burke who hurried the rupture, and stimulated Fox's jealousy of 
Shelburne. The Duke of Richmond disapproved of the seces- 
sion, and remained in the government. Sheridan also disapproved, 
but he sacrificed his personal conviction to loyalty to Fox. 

If Burke was responsible for the break-up of the government, 
then he was the instigator of a blunder that must be ]3ronounced 
not only disastrous but culpable. It lowered the legitimate spirit 
of partv to the nameless spirit of faction. The dangers from 
which the old liberties of the realm had just emerged have been 
described by no one so forcibly as by Burke himself. No one was 
so convinced as Burke that the only way of withstanding the ar- 
bitrary and corrupting policy of the Court was to form a strong 
Whig party. No one knew better than he the sovereign impor- 
tance and the immense difficulty of repairing the ruin of the last 
twelve years by a good peace. The Rockingham or Foxite section 
were obviously unable to form an effective party with serious ex- 
pectation of power, unless they had allies. They might, no doubt, 
from personal dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to work under 
him ; but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally and 
violently working against him, when his policy was their own, and 
when its success was recognised by them no less than by him as 
of urgent moment. Instead of either working with the other 
section of their party, or of supporting from below the gangway 
that which was tfie policy of both sections, they sought to return 
to power by coalescing with the very man whose criminal subser- 
vience to the King's will had brought about the catastrophe that 
Shelburne was repairing. Burke must share the blame of this 
famous transaction. He was one of the most furious assailants of 
the new ministry. He poured out a fresli invective against Lord 
Shelburne every day. Cynical contemporaries laughed as they 
saw him in search of more and more humiliating parallels, ran- 
sacking all literature from the Bible and the Roman history down to 
Mother Goose's tales. His passion carried him so far as to breed 
a reaction in those who listened to him. " I think," wrote Mason 
from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit to Lord Fitz- 
william in the autumn of 1782. " that Burke's mad obloquy against 
Lord Shelburne, and these insolent pamphlets in which he must 
have had a hand, wHI do more to fix him (Shelburne) in his office 
than anything else." 

This result would have actually followed, for the nation was ill 
pleased at the immoral alliance between the Foxites and the man 
whom, if they had been true to their opinions a thousand timei 



BURKE. 67 

repeated, they ought at that moment to have been impeaching. 
The Dissenters, who had hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, 
but who are rigid above other men in their demand of political con- 
sistency, lamented Burke's fall in joining the Coalition, as Priestley 
told him many years after, as the fall of a friend and a brother. 
But Shelburne threw away the game. " His falsehoods," says 
Horace Walpole, " his flatteries, duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, 
contradictions, neglect of his friends, with all the kindred of all 
these faults, were the daily topics of contempt and ridicule ; and 
his folly shut his eyes, nor did he perceive that so very rapid a fall 
must have been owing to his own incapacity." This is the testi- 
mony of a hostile witness. It is borne out, however, by a circum- 
stance of striking significance. When the King recovered the 
reins at the end of 1783, not only did he send for Pitt instead of 
for Shelburne, but Pitt himself neither invited Shelburne to join 
him, nor in any way ever consulted him then or afterwards, though 
he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Shelburne's own 
administration. 

Whatever the causes may have been, the administration fell in 
the spring of 1783. It was succeeded by the memorable ministry 
of the Coalition, in which Fox and Lord North divided the real 
power under the nominal lead of the Duke of Portland. Members 
saw Lord North squeezed up on the Treasury bench between two 
men who had a year before been daily menacing him with the axe 
and the block ; and it was not North whom they blamed, but Burke 
and Fox. Burke had returned to the Pay Office. His first act there 
was unfortunate. He restored to their position two clerks who had 
been suspended for malversation, and against whom proceedings 
were then pending. When attacked for this in the House, he showed 
an irritation which would have carried him to gross lengths, if Fox 
and Sheridan had not by main force pulled him down into his seat by 
the tails of his coat. The restoration of the clerks was an indefensi- 
ble error of judgment, and its indiscretion was heightened by the kind 
of defence which Burke tried to set up. When we wonder at Burke's 
exclusion from great offices, this case of Powell and Bembridge 
should not be forgotten. 

The decisive event in the history of the Coahtion Government 
was the India Bill. The Reports of the various select committees 
upon Indian affairs — the most important of them all, the ninth and 
eleventh, having been drawn up by Burke himself — had shown 
conclusively that the existing system of government was thoroughly 
corrupt and thoroughly inadequate. It is ascertained pretty con- 
clusively that the bill for replacing that system was conceived and 
drawn by Burke, and that to him belongs whatever merit or demerit 
it might possess. It was Burke who infected Fox with his own ar- 
dour, and then, as Moore justly says, the self-kindling power of 
Fox's eloquence threw such fire into defence of the measure, that 
he forgot, and his hearers never found out, that his views were not 
originally and spontaneously his own. The novelty on which the 
great stress of discussion was laid, was that the bill withdrew power 



68 BURKE. 

from the Board of Directors, and vested the government for four 
years in a commission of seven persons named in the bill, and not 
removable by the House. 

Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the Company, 
so persuaded that it was not only full of abuses, but, as he said, one 
of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever ex- 
isted in the world, as to be content with nothing short of the absolute 
deprivation of its power. He avowed himself no lover of names, 
and that he only contended for good government, from whatever 
quarter it might come. But the idea of good government coming 
from the Company he declared to be desperate and untenable. 
This intense animosity, which, considering his long and close famil- 
iarity with the infamies of the rule of the Company's servants, was 
not unnatural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded him to 
the grave objections which really existed to his scheme. In the 
first place, the Bill was indisputably inconsistent with the spirit of 
his revered Constitution. For the legislature to assume the power 
of naming the members of an executive body, was an extraordinary 
and mischievous innovation. Then, to put patronage, which has 
been estimated by a sober authority at about three hundred thou- 
sand pounds a year, into the hands of the House of Commons, was 
still more mischievous and still less justifiable. Worst of all, 
from the point of view of the projectors themselves, after a certain 
time the nomination of the Commissioners would fall to the Crown, 
and this might in certain contingencies increase to a most danger- 
ous extent the ascendancy of the royal authority. If Burke's 
measure had been carried, moreover, the patronage would have 
been transferred to a body much less competent than the Directors 
to judge of the quahties required in the fulfilment of this or that 
administrative charge. Indian promotion would have followed par- 
liamentary and party interest. In the hands of the Directors there 
was at least a partial security, in their professional knowledge, and 
their personal interest in the success of their government, that 
places would not be given away on irrelevant considerations. 
Their system, with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certain 
considerable competency in administration, before a servant reached 
an elevation at which he could do much harm". 

Burke defended the bill (December i, 1783) in one of the 
speeches which rank only below his greatest, and it contains 
two or three passages of unsurpassed energy and impressiveness. 
Everybody knows the fine page about Fox as the descendant of 
Henry IV. of France, and the happy quotation from SiHus Italicus. 
Every book of British eloquence contains the magnificent de- 
scription of the young magistrates who undertake the government 
and the spoliation of India ; how, "animated with all the avarice 
of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after an- 
other, wave after wave ; and there is nothing before the eyes of 
the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of 
birds of prey and of passage, with appetites continually renewing 
for a food that is continually wasting." How they return home 



BURKE. 6^ 

laden with spoil; " their prey is lodged in England ; and the cries 
of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every 
breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean." 
How in India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is ac- 
quired ; while in England are often displayed by the same person the 
virtues which dispense hereditary wealth so that " here the man- 
ufacturer and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual 
hand that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested 
the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or 
wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppression 
and his oppressors." 

No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair faults 
alike in structure and in tactics. The whole design was a master- 
piece of hardihood, miscalculation, and mismanagement. The com- 
bination of interests against the bill was instant, and it was in- 
deed formidable. The great army of returned nabobs, of directors, 
of proprietors of East India stock, rose up in all its immense force. 
Every member of every corporation that enjoyed privilege by 
charter felt the attack on the Companv as if it had been a blow 
directed against himself. The general public had no particular 
passion for purity or good government, and the best portion of the 
pul3lic wasdisgusted with the Coalition. The King saw his chance. 
With politic audacity he put so strong a personal pressure on the 
peers, that they threw out the Bill(December, 1783). It was to no 
purpose that Fox compared the lords to the Janissaries of a Turk- 
ish Sultan, and the King's letter to Temple to the rescript in 
which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to be destroyed. 
Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt was installed in their 
place, and the Whigs were ruined. As a partv, thev had a few 
months of office after Pitt's death, but they were excluded from 
power for half a century, 



JO BURKE. 



CHAPTER VI. 

BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS. 

Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definitely 
abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from close inti- 
macy with the groups who still live for us in the pages of Boswell, 
as no other literary group in our history lives. Goldsmith's famous 
lines in Retaliation show how they all deplored that he should to 
party give up what was meant for mankind. They often told one 
another that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed 
him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound philosophy 
against deism, atheism, and David Hume. They loved to see him, 
as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent. Every- 
body felt at the Literary Club that he had no superior in knowl- 
edge, and in colloquial dialectics only one equal. Garrick was 
there, and of all the names of the time he is the man whom one 
would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts which 
threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like Diderot, and Ger- 
mans like Lich ten berg, into amazement and ecstasy, are exactly 
those gifts which literary description can do least to reproduce. 
Burke was one of his strongest admirers, and there was no more 
zealous attendant at the closing series of performances in which 
the great monarch of the stage abdicated his throne. In the last 
pages that he wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear friend Garrick, 
dead nearly twenty years before, as the first of actors, because he 
was the acutest observer of nature that he had ever known. 

Among men who pass for being more serious than players, 
Robertson was often in London society, and he attracted Burke 
by his largeness and breadth. He sent a copy of his history of 
America, and Burke thanked him with many stately compliments 
for having employed philosophy to judge of manners, and from man- 
ners having drawn new resources of philosophy. Gibbon was there, 
but the bystanders felt what was too crudely expressed by Mackin- 
tosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from a corner of Burke's 
mind without ever being missed. Though Burke and Gibbon con- 
stantly met, it is not likely that, until the Revolution, there was 
much intimacy between tliem, in spite of the respect v/hich each of 
them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other. 
When the Decline and Fall \\2l^ published, Burke read it as every- 
body else did ; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as 



PURKE. ^T 

very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was 
neither a man of letters nor a keen politician ; but he was full of lit- 
erary ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and 
most constant friends, following him with an admiration and rever 
ence that even Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The reader 
of Reynolds's famous Discourses will probably share the wondei 
of his contemporaries, that a man whose time was so absorbed in 
the practice of his art should have proved himself so excellent a 
master in the expression of some of its principles. Burke was 
commonly credited with a large share in their composition, but the 
evidence goes no further than that Reynolds used to talk them 
over with him. The friendship between the pair was full and un- 
alloyed. What Burke admired in the great artist was his sense 
and' his morals, no less than his genius ; and to a man of his fervid 
and excitable temper there was the most attractive of all charms 
in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentleness, evenness, and the habit, as 
one of his friends described it, of being the same all the year 
round. When Reynolds died in 1792, he appointed Burke one of 
his executors, and left him a legacy of two thousand pounds, besides 
cancelling a bond of the same amount. 

Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious com- 
pany who can profitably be compared with Burke in -strength and 
impressiveness of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious 
and genial, in brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This 
striking pair were the two complements of a single noble and solid 
type, holding tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to 
the best idea.s" of a society that was slowly passing. They were 
powerless to hinder the inevitable transformation. One of them 
did not even dimly foresee it. But both of them help us to under- 
stand how manliness and reverence, strength and tenderness, love 
of truth and pity for man, all flourished under old institutions and 
old ways of thinking, into which the forces of the time were even 
then silently breathing a new spirit. The friendship between 
Burke and Johnson lasted as long as they lived ; and if we remember 
that Johnson was a strong Tory, and declared that the first Whig 
was the devil, and habitually talked about cursed Whigs, and bot- 
tomless Whigs, it is an extraordinary fact that his relations with 
the greatest Whig writer and politician of his day were marked by 
a cordiality, respect, and admiration that never varied nor wavered. 
" Burke," he said in a well known passage, '• is such a man that if 
you met him for the first time in the street, where you were stopped 
by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter 
but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that, when 
you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man. He is 
never what we would call humdrum : never unwilling to begin to 
talk, nor in haste to leave off." That Burke was as good a listener 
as he was a talker, Johnson never would allow. " So desirous is 
he to talk," he said, " that if one is talking at this end of the table, 
he'll talk to somebody at the other end." Johnson was far too 
good a critic, and too honest a man, to assent to a remark of 



72 



BURKE. 



Robertson's, that Burke had wit. " No, sir," said the sage, most 
truly, "he never succeeds there. 'Tis low, 'tis conceit." Wit 
apart, he described Burke as the only man whose common conver- 
sation corresponded to his general fame in the world ; take up 
whatever topic you might please, he was ready to meet you. When 
Burke found a seat in Parliament, Johnson said, " Now we who 
know Burke, know that he will be one of the first men in the coun- 
try." He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in the 
House of Commons, for Burke, he said, was always the first man 
everywhere. Once when he was ill, somebody mentioned Burke's 
name; Johnson cried out, " That fellow calls forth all my powers ; 
were I to see Burke now it would kill me." 

Burke heartily returned this high appreciation. When some 
flatterer hinted that Johnson had taken more than his right share 
of the evening's talk, Burke said, " Nay, it is enough for me to 
have rung the bell for him." Some one else spoke of a successful 
imitation of Johnson's style. Burke with vehemence denied the 
success : the performance, he said, hid the pomp, but not the force 
of the original; the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength ; the 
contortions of the sibyl, but none of the inspiration. When Burke 
showed the old sage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant 
gardens at Beaconsfield, Non invidco egiude??t, Johnson said, with 
placid good-will, ?niror inagis. They always parted in the deep» 
and pregnant phrase of a sage of our own day, except in opinioti 
not disagreeing. In truth, the explanation of the sympathy be- 
ween them is not far to seek. We may well believe that Johnson was 
tacitly alive to the essentially conservative spii'it of Burke even in 
his most Whiggish days. And Burke penetrated the liberality of 
mind in a Tory, who called out with loud indignation that the Irish 
vvere in a most unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed 
Dver the majority and the severity of the persecution exercised by 
:hc Protestants of Ireland against the Catholics, exceeded that of 
'he ten historic perse.cutions of. the Christian Church. 

The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the Turk's 
tJead in Gerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at 
Holbach's country house at Grandval. When we think of the 
reckless themes that were so recklessly discussed by Holbach, 
Diderot, and the rest of that indefatigable band, we feel that, as 
against the French philosophic party, an English Tory like Johnson 
and an English Whig like Burke would have found their own 
differences too minute to be worth considering. If the group from 
the Turk's Head could have been transported for an afternoon to 
Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have been the less impatient 
and disgusted of the two. He had the capacity of the more genial 
sort of casuist for playing with subjects, even moral subjects, with 
the freedom, versatility, and ease that are proper to literature, 
Burke, on the contrary, would not have failed to see, as indeed we 
know that he did not fail to see, that a social pandemonium was 
being prepared in this intellectual paradise of open questions, where 
God and a future life, marriage and the family, every dogma of 



BURKE. 73 

reHp:ion, every prescription of morality, and all those mysteries and 
pieties of human life which have been sanctified by the reverence 
of ages, were being busily pulled to pieces, as if they had been toys 
in the hands of a company of sportive children. Even i\\Q Beggar's 
C/<?r<z Burke could not endure to 'hear praised for its wit or its 
music, because his mind was filled by thought of its misplaced 
levity, and he only saw the mischief which such a performance 
tended to do to society. It would be hard to defend his judgment 
in this particular case, but it serves to show how Burke was never 
content with the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant 
he was for effects more profound than those of formal criticism. 
It is true that Johnson was sometimes not less austere in condemn- 
ing a great work of art for its bad morality. The only time when 
he was really angry with Hannah More was on his finding that 
she had read To;n Jones — that vicious book, he called it; he hardly 
knew a more corrupt work. Burke's tendency towards severity of 
moral judgment, however, never impaired the geniality and tender- 
ness of his relations with those whom he loved. Bennet Langton 
gave Boswell an affecting account of Burke's last interview with 
Johnson. A few days before the old man's death, Burke and four 
or five other friends were sitting round his bedside. " Mr. Burke 
said to him, ' I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be oppres- 
sive to you.' 'No, sir,' said Johnson, 'it is not so; and I must 
be in a wretched state, indeed, when your company is not a 
delight to me.' Mr. Burke, in a .tremulous voice, expressive of 
being very tenderly affected, replied, ' My dear sir, you have always 
been too good to me.' Immediately afterwards he went away. 
This was the last circumstance in the acquaintance of these two 
eminent men." 

One of Burke's strongest political intimacies was only less in- 
teresting and significant than his friendship with Johnson. William 
Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the short 
Rockingham administration of 1765. He had no brilliant gifts, but 
he had what was then thought a profound knowledge both of the 
principles and details of the administration of the national revenue. 
He was industrious, steadfast, clear-headed, inexorably upright. 
" Immersed in the greatest affairs," as Burke said in his epitaph, 
" he never lost the ancient, native, genuine English character of a 
country gentleman." And this was the character in which Burke 
now and always saw not only the true political barrier against des- 
potism on the one hand and the rabble on the other, but the best 
moral type of civic virtue. Those who admire Burke, but cannot 
share his admiration for the country gentleman, will perhaps justify 
him by the assumption that he clothed his favourite with ideal 
qualities which ought, even if they did not, to have belonged to 
that position. 

Iji his own modest imitation and in his own humble scale, he 
was a pattern of the activity in public duty, the hospitality towards 
friends, the assiduous protection of neglected worth, which ought 
to be among the chief virtues of high station. It would perhaps 



74 



BURKE. 



be doubly unsafe to take for granted that many of our readers have 
both turned over the pages of Crabbe's Bo?-ough.^ and carried away 
in their minds from that moderately affecting poem, the description 
of Eusebius — 

Th?it pious moralist, that reasoning saint ! 
Can I of worth Hke thine, Eusebius, speak ? 
The man is willing, but the muse is weak. 

Eusebius is intended for Burke, and the portrait is a literary 
tribute for more sabstantial services. When Crabbe came up from 
his native Aldborough, with three pounds and a case of surgical 
instruments in his trunk, he fondly believed that a great patron 
would be found to watch over his transformation from an un- 
successful apothecary into a popular poet. He wrote to Lord North 
and Lord Shelburne, but they did not answer his letters ; book- 
sellers returned his copious manuscripts ; the three pounds gradually 
disappeared ; the surgical instruments went to the pawnbroker's ; 
and the poet found himself an outcast on the world, without a 
friend, without employment, and without bread. He owed money 
for his lodging, and was on the very eve of being sent to prison, 
when it occurred to him to write to Burke. It was the moment 
(1781) when the final struggle with Lord North was at its fiercest, 
and Burke might have been absolved if, in the stress of conflict, he 
had neglected a begging-letter. As it was, the manliness and 
simplicity of Crabbe's application touched him. He immediately 
made an appointment with the young poet, and convinced himself 
of his worth. He not only relieved Crabbe's immediate distress 
with a sum of money that, as we know, came from no affluence of 
his own, but carried him off to Beaconsfield, installed him there as 
a member of the amily, and took as much pains to find a printer 
for The Library and The Village, as if they had been his own 
lX)ems. In time he persuaded the Bishop of Norwich to admit 
Crabbe, in spite of his want of a regular qualification, to holy 
orders. He then commended him to the notice of Lord Chancellor 
Thurlow. Crabbe found the Tiger less formidable than his terrify- 
ing reputation, for Thurlow at their first interview presented him 
with a hundred-pound note, and afterwards gave him ahving. The 
living was of no great value, it is true ; and it was Burke who, with 
untiring friendship, succeeded in procuring something like a sub- 
stantial position for him, by induicng the Duke of Rutland to make 
the young parson his chaplain. Henceforth Crabbe's career was 
assured, and he never forgot to revere and bless the man to whose 
generous hand he owed his deliverance. 

Another of Burke's clients, of whom we hardly know whether 
to say that he is more or less known to our age than Crabbe, is 
Barry, a painter of disputable eminence. The son of a seafarer 
at Cork, he had been introduced to Burke in Dublin in 1762,- was 
brought over to England by him, introduced to some kind of em- 
ployment, and finally sent, with funds provided by the Burkes, te 



BURKE, 



75 



study art on the Continent. It was characteristic of Burke's 
willingness not only to supply money, but, what is a far rarer form 
of kindness, to take active trouble, that he should have followed 
the raw student with long and careful letters of advice upon the 
proper direction of his studies. For five years Barry was maintained 
abroad by the Burkes. Most unhappily for himself, he was cursed 
with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even the 
elementary arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with 
that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves in- 
dependently of gratitude or ingratitude in the receiver. 

From his earliest days Burke had been the eager friend of 
people in distress. While he was still a student at the Temple, or 
a writer for the booksellers, he picked up a curious creature in 
the park, in such unpromising circumstances that he could not 
forbear to take him under his instant protection. This was Joseph 
Emin, the Arminian, who had come to Europe from India with 
strange heroic ideas in his head as to the dehverance of his country- 
men. Burke instantly urged him to accept the few shillings that 
he happened to have in his purse, and seems to have found employ- 
ment for him as a copyist, until fortune brought other openings to 
the singular adventurer. For foreign visitors Burke had always 
a singular considerateness. Two Brahmins came to England as 
agents of Ragonaut Rao, and at first underwent intolerable things 
rather from the ignorance than the unkindness of our countrymen. 
Burke no sooner found out what was passing, than he carried them 
down to Beaconsfield, and as it was summer-time he gave them for 
their separate use a spacious garden-house, where they were free 
to prepare their food and perform the rites as their religion pre- 
scribed. Nothing was so certain to command his fervid sympathy 
as strict adherence to the rules and ceremonies of an ancient and 
sacred ordering. 

If he never failed to perform the offices to which we are bound 
by the common sympathy of men, it is satisfactory to think that 
Burke in return received a measure of these friendly services. 
Among those who loved him best was Doctor Brocklesby, the 
tender physician who watched and soothed the last hours of John- 
son. When we remember how Burke's soul was harassed by pri- 
vate cares, chagrined by the untoward course of public events, and 
mortified by neglect from friends no less than by virulent reproach 
from foes, it makes us feel very kindly towards Brocklesby, to read 
what he wrote to Burke in 1788 : 

RTy very dear friend, — 

My veneration of your public conduct for many years past, and my real 
affection for your private virtues and transcendent worth, made me yester- 
day take a liberty with you in a moment's conversation at my house, to 
make you an instant present of 1000/., which for years past I had by will 
destined as a testimony of my regard on my decease. This you modestly 
desired me not to think of ; but I told you what I now repeat, that un- 
favoured as I have lived for a long life, unnoticed professionally by any 
party of men, and though unknown at court, I am rich enough to spare 



76 



BURKE. 



to virtue (what others waste in vice) the above sum, and still reserve an 
annual income greater than I spend. I shall receive at the India House 
a bill I have discounted for looo/. on the 4th of next month, and then 
shall be happy that you will accept this proof of my sincere love and es- 
teem, and let me add, Sires ampla domi similiscpcc affectibtcs ^sset, I should 
be happy to repeat the like every year." 

The mere transcription of the friendly man's good letter has 
something of the effect of an exercise of religion. And it was 
only one of a series of kind acts on-the Dart of the same generous 
giver. 

It is always interesting in the case of a great man to know how 
he affected the women of his acquaintance. Women do not usu- 
ally judge character either so kindly or so soundly as men do, for 
they lack that knowledge of the ordeals of practical life, which 
gives both justice and charity to such verdicts. But they are more 
susceptible than most men are to devotion and nobility in character. 
The little group of the blue-stockings of the day regarded the 
great master of knowledge and eloquence with mixed feelings. 
They felt for Burke the adoring reverence which women offer, with 
too indiscriminate a trust, to men of commanding power. In his 
case it was the moral loftiness of his character that inspired them, 
as much as the splendour of his ability. Of Sheridan or of Fox 
they could not bear to hear; of Burke they could not hear enough. 
Hannah More, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the learned translator 
of Epictetus, and Fanny Burney, the author of Evelina and Ce- 
cilia, were all proud of his notice, even while they glowed with 
anger at his sympathy with American rebels, his unkind words 
about the King, and his cruel persecution of poor Mr. Hastings. 
It was at Mrs. Vesey's evening parties, given on the Tuesdays on 
which the Club dined at the Turk's Head, that he often had long 
chats with Hannah More. She had to forget what she called his 
political malefactions, before she could allow herself to admire his 
high spirits and good-humour. This was after the events of the 
Coalition, and her Memoirs, like the change in the mind of th^e 
Dissenters towards Burke, show what a fall that act of faction was 
believed to mark in his character. When he was rejected for 
Bristol, she moralised on the catastrophe by the quaint reflection 
that Providence has wisely contrived to render all its dispensations 
equal, by making those talents which set one man so much above 
another of no esteem in the opinion of those who are without 
them. 

Miss Burney has described her flutter of spirits when she first 
found herself in company with Burke (1782). It was at Sir Joshua's 
house on the top of Richmond Hill, and she tells, with her usual 
effusion, how she was impressed by Burke's noble figure and com- 
manding air, his penetrating and sonorous voice, his eloquent and 
copious language, the infinite variety and rapidity of his discourse. 
Burke had something to say on every subject, from bits of per- 
sonal gossip, up to the sweet and melting landscape that lay in all 
its Ueauty before their windows on the terrace. He was playful. 



nURKE. 77 

serious, fantastic, wise. When they next met, the great man com- 
pleted his conquest by expressing his admiration of Evelina. 
Gibbon assured her that he had read the whole five volumes in a 
day ; but Burke declared the feat was impossible, for he had him.- 
sclf read it through without interruption, and it had cost him three 
days. He showed his regard for the authoress in a more substan- 
tial way than by compliments and criticism. His last act, before 
going out of office, in 1783, was to procure for Dr, Burney the ap- 
pointment of organist at the chapel of Chelsea. 

We have spoken of the dislike of these excellent women for 
Sheridan and Fox. In Sheridan's case Burke did not much dis- 
agree with them. Their characters were as unlike and as anti- 
pathetic as those of two men could be ; and to antipathy of temper- 
ament was probably added a kind of rivalry, which may justly have 
affected one of them with an irritated humiliation. Sheridan was 
twenty years younger than Burke, and did not come into Parlia- 
ment until Burke had fought the prolonged battle of the American 
war, and had achieved the victory of Economic Reform. Yet 
Sheridan was immediately taken up by the party, and became the 
intimate and counsellor of Charles Fox, its leader, and of the 
Prince of Wales, its patron. That Burke never failed to do full 
justice to Sheridan's brilliant genius, or to bestow generous and 
unaffected praise on his oratorical successes, there is ample evi- 
dence. He was of far too high and veracious a nature to be ca- 
pable of the disparaging tricks of a poor jealousy. The humilia- 
tion lay in the fact that circumstances had placed Sheridan in a 
position which made it natural for the world to measure them with 
one another. Burke could no more like Sheridan than he could 
like the Beggar^s Opera. Sheridan had a levity, a want of depth, 
a laxity, and dispersion of feeling, to which no degree of intellec- 
tual brilliancy could reconcile a man of such profound moral en- 
ergy and social conviction as Burke. 

The thought will perhaps occur to the reader that Fox was not 
less lax than Sheridan, and yet for Fox Burke long had the sin- 
cerest friendship. He was dissolute, indolent, irregular, and the 
most insensate gambler that ever squandered fortune after fortune 
over the faro-table. It was his vices as much as his politics, that 
made George III. hate Fox as an English Catiline. How can\e 
Burke to accept a man of this character, first for his disciple, then 
for his friend, and nej<t for his leader ? The answer is a simple 
one. In spite of the disorders of his life, Fox, from the time when 
his acquaintance with Burke began, down to the time when it came 
to such disastrous end, and for long years afterwards, was to the 
bottom of his heart as passionate for freedom, justice, and benefi- 
cence as Burke ever was. These great ends were as real, as con- 
stant, as overmastering in Fox as they were in Burke. No man 
was ever more deeply imbued with the generous impulses of great 
statesmanship, with chivalrous courage, with the magnificent spirit 
of devotion to high imposing causes. These qualities, we maybe 
sure, and not his power as a debater and as a declaimer, won for 



78 



BURKE. 



him in Burke's heart the admiration which found such splendid ex* 
prcssion in a passage, that will remain as a stock piece of declama- 
tion for long generations after it was first poured out as a sincere 
tribute of reverence and affection. Precisians, like Lafayette, 
might choose to see their patriotic hopes ruined rather than have 
them saved by Mirabeau, because Mirabeau was a debauchee. 
Burke's pubHc morality was of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox be- 
cause he knew that under the stains and blemishes that had been 
left by a deplorable education was that sterling, inexhaustible ore 
in which noble sympathies are subtly compounded with resplendent 
powers. 

If he was warmly attached to his political friends, Burke, at 
least before the Revolution, was usually on fair terms in private 
life with his political opponents. There were few men whose 
policy he disliked more than he disliked the policy of George Gren- 
ville. And we have seen that he criticised Grenville in a pamphlet 
which did not spare him. Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one 
another's hospitality, and were on the best terms to the very end. 
Wilberforce, again, was one of tlie staunchest friends of Pitt, and 
fought one of tlie greatest electioneering battles on Pitt's side in 
the struggle of 1784 ; but it made no difference in Burke's relations 
with him. In 1787 a coldness arose between them. Burke had 
delivered a strong invective against the French Treaty. Wilber- 
force said, ''We can make allowance for the honourable gentleman, 
because we remember him in belter days." The retort greatly net- 
tled Burke, but the feeling soon passed away, and they both found 
a special satisfaction in the dinner to which Wilberforce invited 
Burke every session. "He was a great man," says Wilberforce. 
'• I could never understand how at one time he grew to be so entirely 
nep^lected." 

Outside of both political and literary circles, among Burke's 
correspondents was that wise and honest traveller whose name is 
as inseparably bound up wath tlie preparation of the French Revolu- 
tion, as Burke's is bound up with its sanguinary climax and fulfil- 
ment. Arthur Young, by his Farmer's Letters, and Farmer's Calen- 
dar, and his account of his travels in the southern countries of Eng- 
land and elsewhere — the story of the more famous travels in France 
was not published until 1792 — had won a reputation as the best-in- 
formed agriculturist of his day. Within a year of his settlement at 
Beaconsfield, we find Burke writing to consult Young on the mys- 
teries of his new occupation. The reader may smile as he recog- 
nises the ardour, the earnestness, the fervid gravity of the political 
speeches, in letters which discuss the merits of carrots in fattening 
porkers, and the precise degree to which they should be boiled. 
Burke throws himself just as eagerly into white peas and Indian 
corn, into cabbages that grow into head and cabbages that shoot 
into leaves, into experiments with pumpkin seed and wildjDarsnip, 
as if they had been details of the Stamp Act, or justice to Ireland. 
When he complains that it is scarcely possible for him, with his nu- 
merous avocations, to get his servants to enter fully into his views 



BURKE. yg 

as to the right treatment of his-crops, we can easily understand that 
Ills farming did not help him to make money, It is impossible that 
he should have had time or attention to spare for the effectual direc- 
tion of even a small farm. 

Yet if the farm brought scantier j^rofit than it ought to have 
brought, it was probably no weak solace in the background of a 
life of harassing interests and perpetual disappointments. Burke 
was happier at Beaconsfield than anywhere else, and he was hap- 
piest there when his house was full of guests. Nothing pleased him 
better than to drive a visitor over to Windsor, where he would ex- 
patiate with en^husiiism "on the proud Keep, rising in the majesty 
of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval 
towers, overseeing and guarding the subjected land." He delighted 
to point out the house at Uxbridge where Charles I. had carried 
on the negotiations with the Parliamentary Commissioners ; the 
beautiful grounds of Bulstrode, where Jwdge Jefferies had once 
lived ; and the church-yard of Beaconsfield, where lay the remains 
of Edmund Waller, the poet. He was fond of talking of great 
statesaien — of Walpole, of Pulteney, and of Chatham. Some one 
had said that Chatham knew nothing whatever except Spenser's 
Faoy Queen. " No matter how that was said," Burke replied to 
one of his visitors, " whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he 
ought to be read, will have a strong hold of the English language." 
The delight of the host m.ust have been at least equalled by the 
delight of the guest in conversation which was thus ever taking new 
turns, branching into topical surprises, and at all turns and on every 
topic was luminous, high, edifying, full. 

No guest was more welcome than the friend of his boyhood ; 
and Richard Shackleton has told how the friendship, cordiaHty, and 
openness with which Burke embraced him was even more than 
might be expected from long love. The simple Quaker was con- 
fused by the siglit of what seemed to him so sumptuous and worldly 
a life, and he went to rest uneasily, doubting whether God's blessing 
could go with it. But when he awoke on the morrow of his first 
visit, he told his wife, in the language of his sect, how glad he was 
"to find no < o ^lemnation ; but on the contrary, ability to put up 
fervent petitions with much tenderness on behalf of this great 
luminary." Itis at his county home that we like best to think 
of Burke. It is still a touching picture to the historic imagina- 
tion to follow him from the heatand violence of the House, 
where tipsy squires derided the greatest genius of his time, down to 
the calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with his own 
hands give food to a starving beggar, or medicine to a peasant 
sick of the ague ; where he would talk of the weather, the turnips, 
and the hay with the team-men and the farm-bailiff ; and where, 
in the evening stillness, he would pace the walk under the trees, 
and reflect on the state of Europe and the distractions of his 
country. 



8o BURKE. 



ciiaptp:r VII. 

THE NEW MINISTRY — WARREN HASTINGS — BURKE'S PUBLIC 
POSITION. 

The six years which followed the destruction of the Coalition 
were, in some respects, the most mortifying portion of Burke's 
troubled career. Pitt was more firmly seated in power than Lord 
North had ever been, and he used his power to carry out a policy 
against which it was impossible for the Whigs, on their own prin- 
ciples, to offer an effcclive resistance. For this is the peculiarity 
of the King's first victory over the enemies who had done obsti- 
nate battle with him for nearly a quarter of a century. He had 
driven them out of the field, but with the aid of an ally who was 
as strongly hostile to the royal system ^s they had ever been. The 
King had vindicated his right against the Whigs to choose his own 
ministers ; but the new minister was himself a Whig by descent, 
and a reformer by his education and personal disposition. 

Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between the 
ministry and their opponents. Here, if anywhere, we might have 
expected from Burke at least his usual wisdom and patience. We 
saw in a previous chapter (p. 21) what the political condition of 
Ireland was when Burke went there with Hamilton in 1763. The 
American war had brought about a great change. The King had 
shrewdly predicted that if America became free, Ireland would 
soon follow the same plan and be a separate state. In fact, along 
with the American war we had to encounter an Irish war also ; 
but the latter was, as an Irish politician called it at the time, a 
smothered war. Like the Americans, the Anglo-Irish entered into 
non-importation compacts, and they interdicted commerce. The 
Irish volunteers, first forty, then sixty, and at last a hundred thou- 
sand strong, were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the English 
ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not the actual 
path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for commercial and 
legislative independence. They were too strong to be resisted, 
and in 1782 tlie Irish Parhament acquired the privilege of initiating 
and conducting its own business, without the sanction or control 
either of the Privy Council or of the Enghsh Parliament. Dazzled 
by the chance of acquiring legislative independence, they had been 
content with the com])aratively small commercial boons obtnincd 
by Lord Nugent and Burke in 1778, and with the reniovnl of fur- 



BURKE. 8 1 

ther restrictions by the alarmed minister in the following year. 
After the concession of their independence in 1782, they found 
that to procure the abolition of the remaining restrictions on their 
commerce — the right of trade, for instance, with America and 
Africa — the consent of the English legislature was as necessary 
as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from the teaching of Adam Smith 
and of Shelburne, brought forward in 1785 his famous commercial 
propositions. The theory of his scheme was that Irish trade 
should be free, and that Ireland should be admitted to a permanent 
participation in commercial advantages. In return for this gain, 
after her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was to 
devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance of the 
navy, in which the two nations had a common interest. Pitt was to 
be believed when he declared that, of all the objects of his political 
life, this was, in his opinion, the most important that he had ever 
engaged in, and he never expected to meet another that should 
rouse every emotion in so strong a degree at this. 

A furious battle took place in the Irish Parliament. There, 
while nobody could deny that the eleven propositions would benefit 
the mercantile interests of the country, it was passionately urged 
that the last of the propositions, that which concerned the appor- 
tionment of Irish revenue to imperial purposes, meant the enslave- 
ment of their unhappy island. Their fetters, they went on, were 
clenched, if the English Government was to be allowed thus to 
take the initiative in Irish legislation. The factious course pursued 
by the English Opposition was much less excusable than the line 
of the Anglo-Irish leaders. Fox, who was ostentatiously ignorant 
of political economy, led the charge. He insisted that Pitt's meas- 
ures would annihilate English trade, would destroy the Navigation 
Laws, and with them would bring our maritime strength to the 
ground. Having thus won the favour of the English manufacturers, 
he turned round to the Irish Opposition, and conciliated them by 
declaring with equal vehemence that the propositions were an in- 
sult to Ireland, and a nefarious attempt to tamper with her new- 
born liberties. Burke followed his leader. We may almost say 
that for once he allowed his political integrity to be bewildered. 
In 1778 and 1779 he had firmly resisted the pressure which his 
mercantile constituents in Bristol had endeavoured to put upon 
him; he had warmly supported the Irish claims, and had lost his 
seat in consequence. The precise ground which he took up in 
1785 was this. He appears to have discerned in Pitt's proposals 
the germ of an attempt to extract revenue from Ireland, identical 
in purpose, principle, and probable effect with the ever'memorable 
attempt to extract revenue from the American Colonies. What- 
ever stress may be laid upon this, we find it hard to vindicate 
Burke from the' charge of factiousness. Nothing can have been 
more unworthy of him than the sneer at Pitt in the great speech 
on the Nabob of Arcot's debts (1785), for stopping to pick up chaff 
and straws from the Irish revenue, instead of checking profligate 
expenditure in India. 

6 



82 BUKKK. 

Pitt's alternative was irresistible. Situated as Ireland was» 
she must either be the subservient instrument of English prosperity, 
or else she must be allowed to enjoy the benefits of English trade, 
taking at the same time a proportionate share of the common bur- 
dens. Adam Smith had shown that there was nothing incompati- 
ble with justice in a contribution by Ireland to the public debt of 
Great Britain. That debt, he argued, had been contracted in sup- 
port of the government established by the Revolution ; a govern- 
ment to which the Protestants of Ireland owed not only the whole 
authority which they enjoyed in their own country, but every secu- 
rity which they possessed for their liberty, property, and religion. 
The neighbourhood of Ireland to the shores of the mother country 
introduced an element into the problem, which must have taught 
every unimpassioned observer that the American solution would 
be inadequate for a dependency that lay at our very door. Burke 
could not, in his calmer moments, have failed to recognise all this. 
Yet he lent himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking his first 
measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland. Had it not been for 
what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session, and 
which had still not subsided, he would have seen that Pitt was in 
truth taking his first measures for the effective deliverance of Ire- 
land from an unjust and oppressive subordination. The same de- 
lirium committed him to another equally deplorable perversity, 
when he opposed, with as many excesses in temper as fallacies in 
statesmanship, the wise treaty with France, in which Pitt partially 
anticipated the commercial policy of an ampler treaty three-quarters 
of a century afterwards. 

A great episode in Burke's career now opened. It was in 1785 
that Warren Hastings rej:urned from India, after a series of ex- 
ploits as momentous and far-reaching, for good or evil, as have ever 
been achieved by any English ruler. For years Burke had been 
watching India. With rising wonder, amazement, and indigna- 
tion he had steadily followed that long train of intrigue and crime 
which had ended in the consolidation of a new empire. With the 
return of Hastings he felt that the time had come for striking a 
severe blow and making a signal example. He gave notice (June, 
1785) that he would, at a future day, make a motion respecting the 
conduct of a gentleman just returned from India. 

Among minor considerations, we have to remember that Indian 
affairs entered materially into the great battle of parties. It was 
upon an Indian bill that the late ministry had made shipwreck. 
It was notoriously by the aid of potent Indian interests that the 
new ministry had acquired a portion of its majority. To expose 
the misdeeds of our agents in India was at once to strike the min- 
ister who had dexterously secured their support, and to attack one 
pi the great strongholds of parliamentary corruption. The pro- 
ceedings against Hastings were, in the first instance, regarded as a 
sequel tg the struggle ovtr Fox's East India Bill. That these 
considerations were present in Burke's thought there is no doubt, 
but they were purely secondary. Ijt was India itself that stood 



BURKE. 8^ 

above all else in his ima<rination. It had filled his mind and ab- 
sorbed his time while Pitt was still an under-graduate at Cam- 
bridge, and Burke was looking forward to match his plan of eco» 
nomic reform with a greater plan of Indian reform. In the Ninth 
Report, the Eleventh Report, and in his speech on the India Bill 
of 1783, he had shown both how thoroughly he had mastered the 
facts, and how profoundly they had stirred his sense of wrong. 
The master-piece known as the Speech on the Nabob of Arcnt's 
debts, delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), 
handles matters of account, of interest turned into principal, and 
principal superadded to principal; it deals with a hundred minute 
teciinicalitiL'S of teeps and tuncaws, of gomastahs and soucaring ; 
all with such a suffusion of interest and colour, with such nobility 
of idea and expression, as could only have come from the addition 
to genius of a deep morality of nature and an overwhelming force 
of conviction. A space less than one of these pages contains such 
a picture of the devastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali as may 
fill the young orator or the young writer with the same emotions of 
enthusiasm, emulation, and despair that torment the artist who first 
gazes on the Madonna at Dresden, or the figures of Night and 
Dawn and the Penseroso at Florence. The despair is only too 
well founded. No conscious study could pierce the secret of that 
just and pathetic transition from the havoc of Hyder Ali to the 
healing duties of a virtuous government, to the consolatory cele- 
brating of the mysteries of justice and humanity, to the warning to 
the unlawful creditors to silence their inauspicious tongues in pres- 
ence of the holy work of restoration, to the generous proclamation 
against them that in every country the first creditor is the plough. 
The emotions which make the hidden force of such pictures come 
not by observation. They grow from the sedulous meditation of 
long years, directed by a powerful intellect and inspired by an inter- 
est in human well-being, which of its own virtue bore the orator 
into the sustaining air of the upper gods. Concentrated i)assion 
and exhaustive knowledge have never entered into a more formida- 
ble combination. Yet, when Burke made his speech on the Nabob 
of Arcot's debts, Pitt and Grenville consulted together whether 
it was worth answering, and came to the conclusion that they need 
not take the trouble. 

Neither the scornful neglect of his opponents, nor the dissua- 
sions of some who sat on his own side, could check the ardour with 
which Burke pressed on, as he said, to the relief of afflicted na- 
tions. The fact is, that Burke was not at all a philanthropist as 
Clarkson and Wilberforce were philanthropists. His sympathy 
was too strongly under the control of true political reason. In 
1780, for instance, the slave-trade had attracted his attention, and 
he had even proceeded to sketch out a code of regulations which 
provided for its immediate mitigation and ultimate suppression. 
After mature consideration he abandoned the attempt, from the 
conviction that the strength of the West India interest would defeat 
the utmost efforts of his party. And he was quite right in refusing 



84 BURKE. 

to hope from any political action what could only be affected after 
the moral preparation of the bulk of the nation. And direct moral 
or philanthropic apostleship was not his function. 

Macaulay, in a famous passage of dazzling lustre and fine his- 
toric colour, describes Burke's holy rage against the misdeeds of 
Hastings as due to his sensibility. But sensibility to what .? Not 
merely to those common impressions of human suffering which 
kindle tlie flame of ordinary philanthropy, always attractive, often so 
beneficent, but often so capricious and so laden with secret detri- 
ment. This was no part of Burke's type. Nor is it enough to say 
that Burke had what is the distinctive mark of the true statesman — 
a passion for good, wise, and orderly government. He had that in 
the strongest degree. All that wore the look of confusion he held 
in abhorrence, and he detected the seeds of confusion with a pene- 
tration that made other men marvel. He was far too wise a man 
to have any sympathy with the energetic exercise of power for 
power's sake. He knew well that triumphs of violence are for the 
most part little better than temporary make-shifts, which leave all 
the work of government to be encountered afterwards l)y men of 
essentially greater capacity than the hero of force without scruple. 
But he regarded those whom he called the great bad men of the 
old stamp, Cromwell, Richelieu, the Guises, the Condes, with a 
certain tolerance, because "though the virtues of such men were 
not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they had long 
views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, 
and not the destruction of their country." What he valued was 
the deep-seated order of systems that worked by the accepted 
uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices of a community. 

This love of right and stable order was not all. That was it- 
self the growth from a deeper root, partly of conviction and partly 
of sympathy ; the conviction of the rare and difficult conjunctures 
of circumstance which are needed for the formation of even the 
rudest forms of social union among mankind ; and then the sym- 
pathy that the best men must always find it hard to withhold from 
any hoary fabric of belief, and any venerated system of government, 
that has cherished a certain order, and shed even a ray of faintest 
dawn, among the violences and the darkness of the race. It was 
reverence rather than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conserva- 
tism rather than philanthropy, which raised that storm in Burke's 
breast against the rapacity of English adventurers in India, and 
the imperial crimes of Hastings. Exactly the same tide of emotion 
which afterwards filled to the brim the cup of prophetic anger 
against the desecrators of the church and the monarchy of France, 
now poured itself out against those who in India had "tossed about, 
subverted and tore to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of boyish 
unluckiness and malice, the most established rights, and the most 
ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations." From 
beginning to end of fourteen years in which Burke pursued 
his campaign against Hastings, we see in every page that the India 
which ever glowed before his vision was not the home of pictur* 



BURKE. 85 

esqiic usages and melodramatic costume, but rather, in his own 
words, the land of princes once of great dignity, authority, and 
opulence ; of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides of the 
l)oople while living, and their consolation in death ; of a nobility of 
antiquity and renown; of millions of ingenious mechanics, an I 
millions of diligent tillers of the earth ; and finally, the land where 
might be found almost all the religions professed by men— the 
Brahminical, the Mussulman, the Eastern and the Western Chris- 
tian. When he published his speech on the Nabob of Arcot, 
Burke prefixed to it an admirable quotation from one of the letters 
of the Emperor Julian. And Julian too, as we all know, had a 
strong feeling for the past. But what in that remarkable figure was 
only the sentimentalism of reaction, in Burke was a reasoned and 
philosophic veneration for all old and settled order, whether in the 
free Parliament of Great Britain, in the ancient absolutism of Ver- 
sailles, or in the secular pomp of Oude, and the inviolable sanctity 
of Benares, the holy city and the garden of God. 

It would be out of place here to attempt to follow the details of 
the impeachment. Every reader has heard that great talc in our 
history, and everybody knows that it was Burke's tenacity and 
power which caused that tale to be told. The House of Commons 
would not, it is true, have directed that Hastings should be impeached 
unless Pitt had given his sanction and approval, and how it was 
that Pitt did give his sanction and approval so suddenly and on 
grounds ostensibly so slender, remains one of the secrets of history. 
In no case would the impeachment have been pressed upon Parlia- 
ment by the Opposition, and assented to by ministers, if Burke had 
not been there with his prodigious industry, his commanding com- 
prehensive vision, his burning zeal, and his power of kindling in 
men so different from him and from one another as Fox, Sheridan, 
Windham, Grey, a zeal only less intense than his own. 

It was in the spring of 1786 that the articles of charge of Hast- 
ings's high crimes and misdemeanours, as Burke had drawn them, 
were presented to the House of Commons. It was in February, 
178S, that Burke opened the vast cause in the old historic hall at 
Westminster, in an oration in which at points he was wound up to 
such a pitch of eloquence and passion that every listener, including 
the great criminal, held his breath in an agony of horror ; that 
women were carried out fainting; that the speaker himself became 
incapable of saying another word, and the spectators of the scene 
began to wonder whether he would not, like the mighty Chatham, 
actually die in the exertion of his overwhelming powers. Among 
the illustrious crowd who thronged Westminster Hall in the open- 
ing days of the impeachment, was Fanny Burney. She was then 
in her odious bondage at Court, and was animated by that ad 
miration and pity for Hastings which at Court was the fashion. 
Windham used to come up from the box of the managers of the 
impeachment to talk over with her the incidents of the day, and she 
gave him her impressions of Burke's speech, which were probably 
those of tlie majority of his hearers, for the majority were favour- 



86 BURKE. 

able to Hastings. "I told him," says Miss Burney, "that Mr. 
Burke's opening had struck me with the highest admiration of his 
powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the diversity 
of expression, and the ready flow of language with which he seemed 
gifted, in a most superior manner, for any and every purpose to 
which rhetoric could lead." " And when he came to his two narra- 
tives," I continued, " when he related the particulars of those dread- 
ful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me ; 
I felt my cause lost. I could hardly keep on my seat. My eyes 
dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused as Mr. Hastings ; 
I wanted to sink on the floor, that they might be saved so painful 
a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself ; not another wish in 
his favour remained. But when from his narration Mr. Burke pro- 
ceeded to his own comments and declamation — when the charges, 
of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny, were general, and made with all the 
violence of personal detestation, and continued and aggravated 
without any further fact or illustration ; then there appeared more 
of study than of truth, more of invective than of justice ; and, in 
short, so little of proof to so much of passion, tlial in a very short 
time I began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer uneasy, 
my eyes were indifferent which way they looked, or what object 
caught them, and before I was myself aware of the declension of Mr. 
Burke's powers over my feelings, I found myself a mere spectator 
in a public place, and looking all round it with my opera-glass in my 
hand ! " 

In 1795, six years after Burke's opening, the Lords were ready 
with their verdict. It had long been anticipated. Hastings was 
acquitted. This was the close for the fourteen years of labour, 
from the date of the Select Committee of 1781. "If I were to call 
for a reward," Burke said, " it would be for the services in which 
for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most indus- 
try and had the least success. I mean the affairs of India; they 
are those on which I value myself the most ; most for the import- 
ance ; most for the labour; most for the judgment; most for con- 
stancy and perseverance in the pursuit." 

The side that is defeated on a particular issue, is often victori- 
ous in the wide and general outcome. Looking back across the 
ninety years that divided us from that memorable scene in West- 
minster Hall, we may see that Burke had more success than at 
first appeared. If he did not convict the man, he overthrew a 
system, and stamped its principles with lasting censure and shame. 
Burke had perhaps a silent conviction that it would have been 
better for us and for India if Clive had succeeded in his attempt 
to blow out his own brains in tlie Madras counting-house, or if the 
battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeat instead of a decisive 
victory. "All these circumstances," he once said, in reference to 
the results of the investigation of the Select Committee, " are not, 
I confess, very favourable to the idea of our attempting to govern 
India at all. But there we are : there we are placed by the Sover- 
eign Disposer, and we must do the best we can in our situation. 



BURKE, ^ gy 

The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." If that situa- 
tion IS better understood now than it was a century ago, and that 
duty more loftily conceived, the result is due, so far as such results 
can ever be due to one man's action apart from the confluence of 
the deep impersonal elements of time, to the seeds of justice and 
humanity which were sown by Burke and his associates. Nobody 
now believes that Clive was justified in tricking Omichund by 
torging another man's name; that Impey was justified in hanginor 
JNuncomarfor committingthe very offence for which Clive was ex* 
ciised or applauded, althoughforgery is no grave crime accordino- lo 
Hindoo usage, and it is the gravest according to English usage ; that 
Hastings did well in selling English troops to assist in the exter- 
mination of a brave people with whom he was at peace ; that Ben- 
held did well in conniving with an Eastern prince in a project of 
extortion against his subjects. The whole drift of opinion has 
changed, and it is since the trial of Hastings that the change has 
taken place. 1 he question in Burke's time was whether oppression 
and corruption were to continue to be the guiding maxims of En<r. 
Iish policy. The personal disinterestedness of the ruler who had 
been the chief founder of this policy, and had most openly set 
aside all pretence of righteous principle, was dust in the balance. 
It was impossible to suppress the policy without striking a deadly 
blow at Its most eminent and powerful instrument, that Has- 
tings was acquitted, was immaterial. The lesson of his impeach- 
ment had been taugjit with sufficiently impressive force— the o-reat 
lesson that Asiatics have rights, and that Europeans have obliga- 
tions ; that a superior race is bound to observe the hi^rhest current 
morality of the time in all its dealings with the subject race. Burke 
IS entitled to our lasting reverence as the first apostle and great 
upholder of integrity, mercy, and honour in the relation between his 
countrymen ana their humble dependents. 

He shared the common fate of those who dare to strike a blow 
tor human justice against the prejudices of national egotism. But 
he was no longer able to bear obloquy and neglect, as he had borne 
It through the war with the colonies. When he opened the im- 
peachment of Hastings at Westminster, Burke was very near to 
his sixtieth year. Hannah More noted in 1786 that his vivacity 
Jiad diminished, and that business and politics had impaired his 
agreeableness. The simpletons in the House, now that they had 
at last found in Pitt a political chief who could beat the Whio- 
leaders on their own ground of eloquence, knowledge, and dexteritv 
in debate, took heart as they had never done under Lord North. 
1 liey now made deliberate attempts to silence the veteran by un- 
mannerly and brutal interruptions of which a mob of lower class 
might have been ashamed. Then suddenly came a moment of such 
excitement as has not often been seen in the annals of party. It 
became known one day, in the autumn of 1788, that the King had 
gone out of his mind. * 

urJ^'"" "f,Vu "^\"''^"y caused the liveliest agitation among the 
Whigs. When the severity of the attack forced the ministry to 



88 . BURKE. 

make preparations for a Regency, the friends oi the Prince of 
Wales assumed that they would speedily return to power, and has- 
tened to form their plans accordingly. Fox was travelling in Italy 
with Mrs. Armitage, and he had been two months away without 
hearing a word from England. The Duke of Portland sent a mes- 
senger in search of him, and after a journey of ten days the messen- 
ger found him at Bologna. Fox instantly set off in all haste for 
London, which he reached in nine days. The three months that 
followed were a time of unsurpassed activity and bitterness, and 
Burke was at least as active and as bitter as the rest of them. He 
was the writer of the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt, sometimes 
jket down to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. It makes 
us feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, calm, 
and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Although we 
read of his thus drawing up manifestoes and protests, and deciding 
minor questions for Fox, which Fox was too irresolute to decide 
for himself, yet we have it on Burke's own authority that some time 
elapsed after the return to England before he even saw Fox ; that 
he was not consulted as to the course to be pursued in the grave 
and difficult questions connected with the Regency; and that he 
knew as little of the inside of Carlton House, where the Prince of 
Wales lived, as of Buckingham House, vvherje the King lived. " I 
mean to continue here," he says to Charles Fox, "until you call 
upon me ; and I find myself perfectly easy, from the implicit con- 
fidence that I have in you and the Duke, and the certainty that I 
am in that you two will do the best for the general advantage of 
of the cause. In that state of mind I feel no desire whatsoever of 
interfering." Yet the letter itself, and others which follow, testify 
to the vehemence of Burke's interest in the matter, and to the per- 
sistency with which he would have had them follow his judgment, 
if they would have listened. It is as clear that they did not listen. 
Apart from the fierce struggle against Pitt's Regency Bill, 
Burke's friends were intently occupied with the reconstruction of 
the Portland cabinet, which the King had so unexpectedly dismissed 
live years before. This was a sphere in which Burke's gifts were 
neither required nor sought. We are rather in distress, Sir Gil- 
bert Elliot writes, for a proper man for the office of Chancellor of 
the Exchequer. Lord J. Cavendish is very unwilling to engage 
again in public affairs. Fox is to be Secretary of State. Burke, 
it" is thought, would not be approved of, Sheridan has not the 
public confidence, and so it comes down therefore to Grey, Pelham, 
myself, and perhaps Windham." Elliot was one of Burke's most 
faithful and attached friends, and he was intimately concerned in 
all that was going on in the inner circle of the party. It is worth 
while, therefore, to reproduce his account, from a confidential letter 
to Lady Elliot, of the way in which Burke's claim to recognition 
was at this time regarded and dealt with. 

Although I can tell you nothing positive about my own situation, I 
was made very hajipy indeed yesterday l)y co-operatting in the settlement 



BURKE. 89 

of Kiirke's, in a manner which gives us great joy as well as comfort. The 
Duke of Portland has felt distressed how to arrange Burke and his family 
in a manner equal to Burke's merits, and to the Duke's own wishes, and 
at the same time so as to be exempt from the many difficulties which seem 
to be in the way. lie sent for Pelham and me, as Burke's friends and his 
own, to advise with us about it; and we dined yesterday with him and the 
Duchess, that we might have time to talk the thing over at leisure and with- 
out interruption after dinner. We stayed, accordingly, engaged in that 
subject till almost twelve at night, and our conference ended most hajjpily, 
and excessively to the satisfaction of us all. The Duke of Portland has 
the veneration for Burke that Windham, Pelham, myself, and a few more 
have, and he thinks it impossible to do too much for him. He considers 
the reward to be given to Burke as a credit and honour to the nation, and 
he considers the neglect of him and his embarrassed situation as having 
been long a reproach to the country. The unjust prejudice and clamour 
which has prevailed against him and his family only determine the Duke 
the more to do him justice. The question was how.'' First, his brother 
Richard, who was Secretary to the Treasury before, will have the same 
office now, but the Duke intends to give him one of the first offices which 
falls vacant- of about 1000/. a year for life in the Customs, and he will then 
resign the Secretary to the Treasury, which, however, in the meanwhile is 
worth 3000/. a year. Edmund Burke is to have the Pay Office, 4000/. a 
year ; but as that is precarious and he can leave no provision for his son, 
it would, in fact, be doing little or nothing of any real or substantial value 
unless some permanent provision is added to it. In this view the Duke is 
to grant him on the Irish establishment a pension of 2000/. a year ciea)- 
for his own life, and the other half to Mrs. Burke for her life. This will 
make Burke completely happy, by leaving his wife and son safe from want 
after his death, if they should survive him. The Duke's affectionate 
anxiety to accomplish this object, and his determination to set all clamour 
at defiance on this point of justice, was truly affecting, and increases my 
attachment for the Duke. . . . The Duke said the only objection to 
this plan was that he thought it was due from this country, and that he 
grudged the honour of it to Ireland; but as nothing in England was ready, 
this plan was settled. You may think it strange that to this moment Burke 
does not know a word of all this, and his family are indeed, I believe, suffer- 
ing a little under the apprehension that he may be neglected in the general 
scramble. I believe there never were three cabinet counsellors more in 
harmony on any subject than we were, nor three people happier in their 
day's work.* 

This leaves the apparent puzzle where it was. Why should 
Burke not be approved of for Chancellor of the Exchequer ? What 
were the many difficulties described as seeming to be in the way of 
arrangini; for Burke, in a manner equal to Burke's merits and the 
Duke of Portland's wishes } His personal relations with the chiefs 
of his party were at this time extremely cordial and intimate. He 
was constantly a guest at the Duke of Portland's most private din- 
ner-parties. Fox had gone down to Beaconsfield to recruit himself 
from the fatigues of his rapid journey from Bologna, and to spend 
some days in quiet with Windham and the master of the house. 
Elliot and Windham, who were talked about for a post for which 
one of them says that Burke would not have been approved, vied 

* Li/d and Letters 0/ Sir G. Elliot, i. 261-3. 



90 



BURKE. 



with one another in adoring Burke. Finally, Elliot and the Duke 
think themselves happy in a day's work which ended in consigning 
the man who not only was, but was admitted to be, the most pow- 
erful genius of their party, to a third-rate post, and that most equiv- 
ocal distinction, a pension on the Irish establishment. The com- 
mon explanation that it illustrates Whig exclusiveness cannot be 
seriously received as adequate. It is probable, for one thing, that 
the feelings of the Prince of Wales had more to do with it than the 
feelings of men like the Duke of Portland or Fox. We can easily 
imagine how little that most worthless of human creatures would 
appreciate the great qualities of such a man as Burke. The painful 
fact which we are unable to conceal from ourselves is, that the 
common opinion of better men than the Prince of Wales leaned in 
the same direction. His violence in the course of the Regency 
debates had produced strong disapproval in the public and down- 
right consternation in his own party. On one occasion he is 
described by a respectable observer as having " been wilder than 
ever, and laid himself and his party more open than ever speaker 
did. He is folly personified, but shaking his cap and bells under 
the laurel of genius. He finished his wild speech in a manner next 
to madness." Moore believes that Burke's indiscretions in these 
trying and prolonged transactions sowed the seeds of the aliena- 
tion between him and Fox two years afterwards. Burke's excited 
state of mind showed itself in small things as well as great. Going 
with Windham to Carlton House, Burke attacked him in the coach 
for a difference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, and behaved 
with such unreasonable passion and such furious rudeness of man- 
ner, that his magnanimous admirer had some difficulty in obliterat- 
ing the impression. The public were less tolerant. Windham 
has told us that at this time Burke was a man decried, persecuted, 
and proscribed, not being much valued even by his own party, and 
by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious 
madman.* This is evidence be3'ond impeachment, for Windham 
loved and honoured Burke with the affection and reverence of a 
son ; and he puts the popular sentiment on record with grief and 
amazement. There is other testimony to the same effect. The 
late Lord Lansdowne, who must have heard the subject abundantly 
discussed by those who were most concerned in it, was once asked 
by a very eminent man of our own time why the Whigs kept Burke 
out of their cabinets. '-'- Burke ! " he cried ; " he was so violent, so 
overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that to have got on with 
him in a cabinet would have been utterly and absolutely impos- 
sible." 

On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficulties 
in the way of Burke's promotion to high office were his notoriously 
straitened circumstances ; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal 
and political passion ; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the un- 
just prejudice and clamour against him and his family, and what 

* Windham's Diary, p. 213. 



BURKE, (jl 

Burke himself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all 
his life. The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated in 
the arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalition 
ministries. But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at 
work. It would have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, 
and 1788 to give cabinet rank to a man round whose name there 
floated so many disparaging associations. Social courage is exactly 
the virtue in which the constructors of a government will always 
think themselves least able to indulge. Burke, we have to remem- 
ber, did not stand alone before the world. Elliot describes a din- 
ner-party at Lord Fitzwilliams's, at which four of these half-dis- 
credited Irishmen were present. "Burke has now got such a 
train after him as would sink anybody but himself — his son, who 
is quite nauseated hy all mankind ; his brother, who is liked better 
than his son, but is rather offensive with animal spirits and with 
brogue ; and his cousin. Will Burke, who is just returned unex- 
pectedly from India, as much ruined as when he went many years 
ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of power that 
Burke may ever have." It was this train, and the ideas of adven- 
turership that clung to them, the inextinguishable stories about 
papistry and Saint Omer's, the tenacious calumny about the letters 
of Junius, the notorious circumstances of embarrassment and 
neediness — it was all these things which combined with Burke's 
own defects of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees 
as decent a reason as they could have desired for keeping all the 
great posts of state in their own hands. 

It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Regency had 
caused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction and strain in the re- 
lations between Fox and Burke. Their feelings to one another 
have been well compared to the mutual discontent between part- 
ners in unsuccessful play, where each suspects that it is the mis- 
takes of the other that lost the game. Whether Burke felt con- 
scious of the failures in discretion and temper, which were the real 
or pretended excuse for neglect, we cannot tell. There is one 
passage that reveals a chagrin of this kind. A few days after the 
meeting between the Duke of Portland and Elliot, for the purpose 
of settling his place in the new ministry, Burke went down to 
Beaconsfield. In writing (January 24th, 1789) to invite Windham 
and Pelham to come to stay a night, with promise of a leg of mut- 
ton cooked by a dairy-maid who was not a bad hand at a pinch, he 
goes on to say that his health has received some small benefit from 
his journey to the country. " But this view to health, though far 
from unnecessary to me, was not the chief cause of my present 
retreat. I began to find that I was Lrrosvn rather too anxious : and 
had begun to discover to myself mhI to others a solicitude relative 
to the present state of affairs, whicli, though their strange condi- 
tion might well warrant it in others, is certainly less suitable to my 
time of life, in which all emotions are less allowed ; and to which, 
most certainly, all human concerns ought in reason to become 



02 BURKE. 

more indifferent, than to those who have work to do, and a good 
deal of day, and of inexhausted strength, to do it in." * 

The King's unexpected restoration to health two or three weeks 
later, brought to nought all the hope and ambition of the Whigs, 
and confirmed Pitt in power for the rest of Burke's lifetime. But 
an event now came to pass in the world's history which trans- 
formed Burke in an instant from a man decried, persecuted, pro- 
scribed, into an object of exultant adoration all over Europe. 

* Corrtspondcnce, iii. 89. 



BURKE, 93 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

We have now come to the second of the two momentous 
chancres in the world's affairs, in which Burke played an imposing 
and historic part. His attitude in the first of them, the struggle 
for American independence, commands almost without alloy the 
admiration and reverence of posterity. His attitude in the second 
of them, the great revolution in France, has raised controversies 
which can only be compared in heat and duration to the master 
controversies of theology. If the history of society were written 
as learned men write the history of the Christian faith and its 
churches, Burke would figure in the same strong prominence, 
whether deplorable or glorious, as Arius and Athanasius, Augus- 
tine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius. If we ask how it is that 
now, nearly a century after the event, men are still discussing 
Burke's pamphlet on the Revolution as they are still discussing 
Bishop Butler's Analogy, the answer is that in one case as in the 
other the questions at issue are still unsettled, and that Burke 
offers in their highest and most comprehensive form all the con- 
siderations that belong to one side of the dispute. He was not of 
those of whom Coleridge said that they proceeded with much 
solemnity to solve the riddle of the French Revolution by anec- 
dotes. He suspended it in the same light of great social^ ideas 
and wide principles, in which its authors and champions professed 
to represent it. Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical 
exhortation, in our opinion the most mischievous and indefensible 
that has ever been pressed by any statesman on any nation. But 
the force of the criticism remains, its' foresight remains, its 
commemoration of valuable elements of life which men were for- 
gettinc^, its discernment of the limitations of things, its sense of 
the awful emergencies of the problem. When our grandchildren 
have made up their minds, once for all, as to the merits of the 
social transformation which dawned on Europe in 1789, then 
Burke's Reflections will become a mere literary antiquity, and not 
before. , .. 

From the very beginning Burke looked upon the proceedings 
in France with distrust. He had not a moment of enthusiasm or 
sympathy of which to repent. When the news reached England 
that the insurgents of Paris had stormed the Bastille Fox ex. 



94 



BURJCE. 



rlaimed with exultation, how much it was the greatest event that 
had ever happened in the world, how much the best. Is it an 
infirmity to wish, for an instant, that some such phrase of generous 
hope had escaped from Burke ; that he had for a day or an hour 
undergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the spirits of 
men like Wordsworth and Coleridge ? Those great poets, who 
were destined one day to preach even a wiser and a loftier con- 
servatism than his own, have told us what they felt- 
When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, 
And witli that oath, which smote air, earth and sea, 
Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free. 

Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a catas- 
trophe. In August he wrote to Lord Charlemont that the events 
in France liad something paradoxical and mysterious about them ; 
that the outbreak of the old Parisian ferocity might be no more 
than a sudden explosion, but if it should happen to be character 
rather than accident, then the people would need a strong hand 
like that of their former masters to coerce them ; that all depended 
upon the French having wise heads among them, and upon these 
wise heads, if such there were, acquiring an authority to match 
their wisdom. There is nothing here but a calm and sagacious 
suspense of judgment. It soon appeared that the old Parisian 
ferocity was still alive. In the events of October, 1789, when the 
mob of Paris marched out to Versailles and marched back again 
with the King and Queen in triumphal procession, Burke felt in 
his heart that the beginning of the end had come, and that the ca- 
tastrophe was already at hand. In October he wrote a long letter 
to the French gentleman to whom he afterwards addressed the 
Reflections. "You hope, sir," he said, "that I think the French 
deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think that all 
men who desire it deserve it. We cannot forfeit our right to 
it, but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. 
The liberty I mean is j-^^r/^/ freedom. It is that state of things in 
which liberty is secured by equality of restraint. This kind of 
liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice. Whenever a sep- 
aration is made between liberty and jjistice, neither is in my opin- 
ion safey The weightiest and most important of all political 
truths, and worth half the fine things that poets have sung about 
freedom — if it could only have been respected, how different the 
course of the Revolution ! But the engineer who attempts to deal 
with the abysmal rush of the falls of Niagara must put aside the 
tools that constructed the Bridgewater Canal and the Chelsea 
Waterworks. Nobody recognised so early as Burke that France 
had really embarked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the 
pith of all his first criticisms, including the Reflections, was the 
proposition that to separate freedom from justice was nothing 
else than to steer the ship of state direct into the Maelstrom. It is 
impossible to deny that this was true. Unfortunately it was q 



BURKE. g^ 

truth which the wild spirits that were then abroad in the storm 
made of no avail. 

Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole soul 
was bound up in order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, 
found himself face to face with the portentous man-devouring 
Sphinx. He, who could not endure that a few clergymen should 
be allowed to subscribe to the Bilile instead of to the Articles, saw 
the ancient Church of Christendom prostrated, its possessions 
confiscated, its priests proscribed, and Christianity itself officially 
superseded. The economical reformer, who when his zeal was 
hottest declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a scullion in the royal 
kitchen, who should have acquired the shadow of a vested interest 
in his post, beheld two great orders stripped of their privileges and 
deprived of much of their lands, though their possession had been 
sanctified by the express voice of the laws and the prescription of 
many centuries. He, who was full of apprehension and anger at the 
proposal to take away a member of Parliament from St. Michael's 
or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most august monarchy in 
Europe was overturned. The man who dreaded fanatics, hated 
atheists, despised political theorisers, and was driven wild at the 
notion of applying metaphysical rights and abstract doctrines to 
public affairs, suddenly beheld a whole kingdom given finally up to 
fanatics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked of nothing but the 
rights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin and blood- 
shed could make between themselves and every incident or insti- 
tution in the history of their land. The statesman who had once 
declared, and hal itually proved his preference for peace over even 
truth, who had all his life surrounded himself with a mental para- 
dise of order and equilibrium, in a moment found himself con- 
fronted by the stupendous and awfulspectre which a century of dis- 
order had raised in its supreme hour. It could not have been 
difficult for any one who had studied Burke's character and career, 
to foretell all that now came to pass with him. 

It was from an English, and not from a French point of view, 
that Burke was first drawn to write upon the Revolution. The 4th 
of November was the anniversary of the landing of the Prince of 
Orange, and the first act in the Revolution of 1688. The members 
of an association which called itself the Revolution Society, chiefly 
composed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of Churchmen, 
including a few peers and a good many members of the House of 
Commons, met as usual 10 hear a sermon in commemoration of the 
glorious day. Dr. Price was the preacher, and both in the morning 
sermon and in the speeches which fellowed in the festivities of the 
afternoon the French were held up to the loudest admiration, as 
having carried the principles of our own Revolution to a loftier 
height, and having opened boundless hopes to mankind. By these 
harmless proceedings Burke's anger and scorn were aroused to a 
pitch which must seem to us, as it seemed to not a few of his con- 
temporaries, singularly out of all proportion to its cause. Deeper 
things were doubtless in silent motion within him. He set to work 



96 



BURKE. 



upon a denunciation of Price's doctrines, with a velocity that re- 
minds us of Aristotle's comparison of anj^er to the over-hasty 
servant, who runs off with all speed before he has listened to half 
<he message. This was the orij^in of the Rejlections. The design 
grew as the writer went on. His imagination took fire ; his mem- 
ory quickened a throng of imj^ressive associations; his excited 
vision revealed to him a hand of vain, petulant upstarts persecuting 
the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a virtuous and innocent 
sovereign, and covering with humiliation the august daughter of the 
Cicsars ; his mind teemed with the sage maxims of the philosophy 
of things established, and the precepts of the gospel of order. Every 
courier that crossed the Channel supplied new material to his con- 
tempt and his alarm. He condemned the whole method and course 
of the P^rench reforms. His judgment was in suspense no more. 
He no longer distrusted ; he hated, despised, and began to dread. 
Men soon began to whisper abroad that Burke thought ill of 
what was going on over the water. When it transpired that he 
was writing a pamphlet, the world of letters was stirred with the 
liveliest expectation. The name of the author, the importance of 
the subject, and the singularity of his opinions, so Mackintosh in- 
forms us, all inflamed the public curiosity. Soon after Parliament 
met for the session (1790), the army estimates were brought up. 
P'ox criticised the increase of our forces, and incidentally hinted 
something in praise of the French army, which had shown that a 
man could be a soldier without ceasing to be a citizen. Some 
days afterwards the subject was revived, and Pitt, as well as Fox, 
avowed himself hopeful of the good effect of the Revolution upon 
the order and government of France. Burke followed in a very 
different vein, openly proclaiming that dislike and fear of the Rcvoi 
lution which was to be the one ceaseless refrain of all that he 
S])oke or wrote for the rest of his life. He deplored Fox's praise 
of the army for breaking their lawful allegiance, and then he ])ro- 
ceeded with ominous words to the effect that, if any friend of his 
should concur in any measures which should tend to introduce 
such a democracy as that of France, he would abandon his best 
friends and join with his worst enemies to oppose either the means 
or the Q\\(\.. This has unanimously been pronounced one of the 
most brilliant and effective speeches that Burke ever made. Fox 
rose with distress on every feature, and made the often-quoted 
declaration of his debt to Burke : " If all the political information 
I have learned from books, all which I have gained from science, 
and all which my knowledge of the world and its affairs has taught 
me, were put into one scale, and the improvement which I have 
derived from my right honourable friend's instruction and conver- 
sation were placed in the other, I should be at a loss to decide to 
which to give the preference. I have learnt more from my right 
honourable friend than from all the men with whom I ever con- 
versed." All seemed likely to end in a spirit of conciliation, until 
Sheridan rose, and in the plainest terms that he could find expressed 
his dissent from everything that Burke had said. Burke immedi- 



BUKKt.. 



97 



ately renounced his friendship. For the first time n his life he 
found the sympathy of the House vehemently on his side. 

In the following month (March, 1790) this unpromising^ inci- 
dent was succeeded by an aberration which no rational man will 
now undertake to defend. Fox brought forward a motion for the 
repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. He did this in accord' 
ance with a recent suggestion of Burke's own, that he should 
strengthen his political position by winning the support of the Dis- 
senters. Burke iiimself had always denounced the Test Act as bad, 
and as an abuse of sacred things. To the amazement of everybody, 
and to the infinite scandal of his party, he now pronounced the 
Dissenters to be disaffected citizens, and refused to relieve them. 
Well might Fox say that Burke's words had filled him with grief 
and shame. 

Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose. Burke 
revised, erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasised, wrote and 
re-wrote with indefatigable industry. With the manuscript con- 
stantly under his eyes, he lingered busily, pen in hand, over para- 
graphs and phrases, antitheses and apophthegms. The ReJlectio7is 
was no superb improvisation. Its composition recalls Palma Gio- 
vine's account of the mighty Titian's way of woikinj^; how the 
master made his preparations with resolute strokes of a heavily- 
laden brush, and then turned his picture to the wall, and In-and-by 
resumed again, and then again and again, re-dressing, adjusting, 
modelling the light with a rub of his finger, or dabbing a spot of 
dark colour into some corner with a touch of his thumb, and finally 
working all his smirches, contrasts, abruptnesses, into the glorious 
harmony that we know. Burke was so unwearied m this insatiable 
correction and alteration, that the printer found it necessary, in- 
stead of making the changes marked upon the proof-sheets, to set 
up the whole in type afresh. The work was upon the easel for ex- 
actly a year. It was November (1790) before the result came into 
the hands of the public. It was a small octavo of three hundred 
and fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice the present 
volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of grey paper, and sold foi 
five shillings. In less than twelve months it reached its eleventh 
edition, and it has been computed that not many short of Ihirt} 
thousand copies were sold within the next six years. 

The first curiosity had languished in the course of the long 
delay, but it was revived in its strongest force when the book itselT 
appeared, A remarkable effect instantly followed. Before the 
Reflections was published, the predominant sentiment in England 
had been one of mixed astonishment and sympathy. Pitt had ex- 
pressed this common mood both in the House of Commons and in 
private. It was impossible for PLngland not to be amazed at the 
uprising of a nation whom they had been accustomed to think of 
as willing slaves, and it was impossible for her, when the scene did 
not happen to be the American colonies or Ireland, not to profess 
good wishes for the cause of emancipation all over the world. 
Apart from the natural admiration of a free people for a neighbour 

7 



^8 BURKE. 

struggling to be free, England saw no reason to lament a blow to 
a sovereign and a government who had interfered on the side of 
her insurgent colonies. To this easy state of miind Burke's book 
put an immediate end. At once, as contemporaries assure us, it 
divided the nation into two parties. On both sides it precipitated 
opinion. Willi a long-resounding blast on his golden trumpet 
Burke had unfurled a new flag, and half the nation'hurried to rally 
to it — that half which had scouted his views on America, which had 
bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, which had mocked 
his ideas on religious toleration, and which a moment before had 
'lated and reviled him beyond all men living, for his fierce tenacity 
in the impeachment of Warren Hastings. The King said to every- 
body who came near him that the book was a good book, a very 
good book, and every gentleman ought to read it. The universi- 
ties began to think of offering the scarlet gown of their most hon- 
ourable degree to the assailant of Price and the Dissenters. The 
great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives 
and never use their reason, took violent alarm. The timorous, the 
weak-minded, the bigoted, were suddenly awakened to a sense of 
what they owed to themselves. Burke gave them the key which 
enabled them to interpret the Revolution in harmony with their 
usual ideas and their temperament. 

Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch. One preacher in a parish 
church in the neighbourhood of London celebrated the anniversa^^ 
of the Restoration of King Charles II. by a sermon, in which the 
pains of eternal damnation were confidently promised to political 
disaffection. Romilly, mentioning to a friend that the Reflections 
liad got into a fourteenth edition, wondered whether Burke was not 
rather ashamed of his success. It is when we come to the rank 
and file of reaction that we find it hard to forgive the man of genius 
who made himself the organ of their selfishness, their timidity, and 
their blindness. We know, alas ! that the parts of his writings on 
French affairs to which they would fly v/ere not likely to be the parts 
which calm men now read with sympathy, but the scoldings, the 
screamings, the unworthy vituperation with which, especially in the 
latest of them, he attacked everybody who took part in the Revo- 
lution, from Condorcet and Lafayette down to Marat and Couthon. 
It was the feet of clay that they adored in their image, and not the 
head of fine gold and the breasts and the arms of silver. 

On the continent of Europe the excitement was as great among 
the ruling classes as it was at home. Mirabeau, who had made 
Burke's acquaintance some years before in England, and even been 
his guest at Beaconsfield, now made the Reflections the text of 
more than one tremendous philippic. Louis XVI. is said to have 
translated the book into French with his own hand. Catherine of 
Russia, V^oltaire's adored Semiramis of the North, the benefactress 
of Diderot, the ready helper of the philosophic party, pressed her 
congratula?tions on the great pontiff of the old order, who now thun- 
dered anathema against philosophers and all their works. 

It is important to Temember the stage which the Revolution 



BURKE. 99 

had reached when Burke was composing his attack upon it. The 
year 1790 was precisely the time when the hopes of the best men in 
Finance shone most brightly, and seemed more reasonable. There 
had been disorders, and Paris still had ferocity in her mien. But 
Robespierre was an obscure figure on the back benches of the 
Assembly. Nobody ever heard of Danton. The name of Repub- 
lic had never been so much as whispered. The King still believed 
that constitutional monarchy would leave him as much power as he 
desired. He had voluntarily gone to the National Assembly, and 
in simple language had cxhoVtjd them all to imitate his example by 
professing the single opinion, the single interest, the single wish — 
attachment to the new constitution, and ardent desire for the peace 
and happiness of France. The clergy, it is true, were violently 
irritated by the spoliation of their goods, and the nobles had crossed 
the Rhine, to brood impotently in the safety of Coblenz over pro- 
jects of a bloody revenge upon their country. But France, mean- 
awhile, paid little heed either to the anger of the clergy or the 
menaces of the emigrant nobles, and at the very moment when 
Burke was writing his most sombre pages, Paris and the provinces 
were celebrating with transports of joy and enthusiasm the civic 
oath, the federation, the restoration of concord to the land, the 
final estabhshment of freedom and justice in a regenerated France. 
This was the happy scene over which Burke suddenly stretched 
out the right arm of an inspired prophet, pointing to the cloud of 
thunder and darkness that was gathering on the hills, and proclaim- 
ing to them the doom that had been written upon the wall by the 
fingers of an inexorable hand. It is no wonder that when the 
cloud burst and the doom was fulfilled, men turned to Burke, as 
they went of old to Ahithophel, whose counsel was as if a man had 
inquired of the oracle of God. 

It is not to our purpose to discuss all the propositions advanced 
in the Reflections^ much less to reply to them. The book is like 
some temple, by whose structure and design we allow ourselves to 
be impressed, without being careful to measure the precise truth or 
fitness of the worship to which it was consecrated by its first foun- 
ders. Just as the student of the Politics of Aristotle may well ac- 
cept all the wisdom of it, without caring to protest at every turn 
against slavery as the basis of a society, so we may well cherish 
all the wisdom of the ReJlectio7is^ at this distance of time, without 
markin-g as a rubric on every page that half of these impressive 
formulae and inspiring declamations were irrelevant to the occasion 
which called them fortli, and exercised for the hour an influence 
that was purely mischievous. Time permits to us this profitable 
lenity. In reading this, the first of his invectives, it is important 
for the sake of clearness of judgment to put from our minds the 
practical policy which Burke afterwards so untiringly urged upon 
his countrymen. As yet there is no exhortation to England to in- 
terfere, and we still listen to the voice of the statesman, and are 
not deafened by the passionate cries of the preacher of a crusade. 
When Burke wrote the Reflection. , he was justified in criticising the 



loo BURKE. 

Revolution as an extraordinary movement, but still a movement 
professing to be conducted on the principles of rational and prac- 
ticable politics. They were the principles to wliich competent 
onlookers like Jefferson and Morris had expected the Assembly to 
conform, but to which the Assembly never conformed for an in- 
stant. It was on the principles of rational politics that Fox and 
Sheridan admired it. On these principles Burke condemned it. 
He declared that the methods of the Constituent Assembly, up to 
the summer of 1790, were unjust, precipitate, destructive, and with- 
out stability. IVIen had chosen to build their house on the sands, 
and the winds and the seas would speedily beat against it and over- 
throw it. 

His prophecy was ^ 1 to the letter. What is still more im- 

portant for the credit v... ...o foresight is, that not only did his pro- 
phecy come true, but it came true for the reasons that he had fixed 
upon^ It was, for instance, the constitution of the Church, in which 
Burke saw the worst of the many bad mistakes of the Assembly. 
History, now slowly shaking herself free from the passions of a 
century, agrees that the civil constitution of. the clergy was the 
measure which, more than any other, decisively put an end to what- 
ever hopes there might have been of a peaceful transition from the 
old order to the new. A still more striking piece of foresight is 
the prediction of the despotism of the Napoleonic Empire. I3urke 
had compared the levelling policy of the Assembly in their geomet- 
rical division of the departments, and their isolation from one an- 
other of the bodies of the state, to the treatment which a conquered 
country receives at the hands of its conquerors. Like Romans in 
Greece or Macedon, the French innovators had destroyed the 
bonds of union, under colour of providing for the independence of 
each of their cities. " If the present project of a Republic should 
fail," Burke said, with a prescience reallv profound, "all securities 
to a moderate freedom fail with it. All the indirect restraints 
which mitigate despotism are removed ; insomuch that, if monarchy 
should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in France under 
this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily 
tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels of the 
prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared on 
earth." Almost at the same moment Mirabeau was secretly writing 
to the King, that their plan of reducing all citizens to a single class 
would have delighted Richelieu. This equal surface, he said, 
facilitates the exercise of power, and many reigns in an absolute 
government would not have done as much as this single year of 
revolution for the royal authority. Time showed that Burke and 
Mirabeau were right. 

History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levity and 
precipitancy of the first set of actors in the revolutionary drama. 
No part of the Reflections is more energetic than the denunciation 
of geometric and literary methods ; and these are just what the 
modern explorer hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catas- 
trophe. De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made liter 



BURKE. loi 

ary men the principal persons in France, and the effect which this 
had upon the Revolution (Bk. in. ch. i.), is only a little too cold to 
be able to pass for Burke's own. (2"'"^''^ work on the Revolution 
is one long sermon, full of eloquence and cogency, upon the inca- 
pacity and blindness of tlie men who undertook the conduct of a 
tremendous crisis upon mere literary methods, without the moral 
courage to obey the logic of their beliefs, with the student's 
ignorance of the eager passion and rapid imagination of multitudes 
of men, with the pedant's misappreciation of a people, of whom it 
has been said by one of themselves that there never was a nation 
more led by its sensations, and less by its principles. Comte, again, 
points impressively to the Revolution as the period which illustrates 
more decisively than another the peril of confounding the two 
great functions of speculation and political action ; and he speaks 
with just reprobation of the preposterous idea in the philosophic 
politicians of the epoch, that society was at their disposal, inde- 
pendent of its past development, devoid of inherent impulses, and 
easily capable of being morally regenerated by the mere modifica- 
tion of legislative rules. 

What then was it that, in the midst of so much perspicacity as 
to detail, blinded Burke, at the time when he wrote the Rejleciions^ 
to the true nature of the movement ? Is it not this, that he judges 
the Revolution as the solution of a merely political question ? If 
the Revolution had been merely political, his judgment would b.ave 
been adequate. The question was much deeper. It was a .social 
question that burned under the surface of what seemed no more than 
a modification of external arrangements. That Burke was alive to 
the existence of social problems, and that he was even tormented by 
them, we know from an incidental passage in the Reflections. There 
he tells us how often he had reflected, and never reflected witliout 
feeling, upon the innumerable servile and degrading occupations 
to whicli, by the social economy, so many wretches are inevitably 
doomed. He had pondered whether there could be any means of 
rescuing these unhappy people from their miserable industry, with- 
out disturbing the natural course of things, and impeding the great 
wheel of circulation which is turned by their labour. This is the 
vein of that striking passage in his first composition, which I have 
already quoted (p. i6). Burke did not yet see, and probably never 
saw, that one key to the events which astonished and exasperated 
him, was simply that the persons most urgently concerned had 
taken the riddle which perplexed him into their own hands, and had 
in fiery earnest set about their own deliverance. The pith of the 
Revolution, up to 1790, was less the political constitution, of which 
Burke says so much, and so much that is true, but the social and 
economic transformation of which he says so little. It was not a 
question of the power of the King, or the measure of an electoral 
circumscription, that made the Revolution ; it was the iniquitous 
distribution of the taxes, the scourge of the militia service, the 
scourge of the road service, the destructive tyranny exercised in 
the vast preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and imposts 



I09 



BURKE. 



of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens and heavy 
impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty and industrious part 
of the nation. If he had seen ever so clearly that one of the most 
important sides of the Revolution in progress was the rescue of 
the tiller of the soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed 
events with bitter suspicion. For the process could not be ex- 
ecuted without disturbing the natural course of things, and with- 
out viohiting his principle that all changes should find us with our 
minds tenacious of justice and tender of property. A closer ex- 
amination t lan he chose to give, of the current administration alike 
of justice and of property under the old system, would have ex- 
plained to him lliat an hour had come in which the spirit of prop 
erty and of justice compelled a supersession of the letter. 

If Burke had insisted on rigidly keeping sensibility to the 
wrongs of the French people out of the discussion, on the ground 
that the whole subject was one of positive knowledge and logical 
inference, his position would have been intelligible and defensible. 
He followed no such course. His pleading turns constantly to 
arguments from feeling ; but it is always to feeling on one side, 
and to a sensibility that is only alive to the concentrated force of 
historic associations. How much pure and uncontrolled emotion 
had to do with what ought to have been the reasoned judgments 
of his understanding, we know on his own evidence. He had 
sent the proof-sheets of a part of his book to Sir Philip Francis. 
They contained the famous passage describing the French Queen 
as he had seen her seventeen years before at Versailles. Francis 
bluntly wrote to him that, in his opinion, all Burke's eloquence 
about Marie Antoinette was no better than pure foppery, and he 
referred to the Queen herself as no better than Messalina. Burke 
was so excited by this that his son, in a rather officious letter, 
begged Francis not to repeat such stimulating remonstrance. 
What is interesting in the incident is Burke's own reply. He 
knew nothing, he said, of the story of Messalina, and declined the 
obligation of proving judicially t'le virtues of all those whom he 
saw suffering wrong and contumely, before he endeavoured to 
interest others in their sufferings, and before endeavouring to 
kindle horror against midnight assassins at backstairs and their 
more wicked abettors in pulpits. And then he went on, " I tell 
you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the 
Queen of France in the year 1774 [1773], and the contrast between 
that brilliancy, splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate homage 
of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789 which I was 
describing, ^//<r/ draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These 
tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the 
description — they may again." 

The answer was obvious. It was well to pity the unmerited 
agonies of Marie Antoinette, though as yet, we must remember, 
she had suffered nothing beyond the indignities of the days of 
October at Versailles. But did not the protracted agonies of a 
nation -eserve the tribute of a tear ? As Paine asked, were men to 



RURKE. 103 

weep over the plumage, and forget the flying bird ? The bulk of 
the people must labour, J3urke told them, " to obtain what by labour 
can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly' do, the 
success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught 
their consolation in tlie final proportions of eternal justice." When 
we know that a L\ons silkweaver, working as hard as he could for 
over seventeen hours a day, could not earn money enough to pro- 
cure the most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we may 
know with what benignity of brow eternal justice must have pre- 
sented herself in the garret of that hapless wretch. It was no idie 
abstraction, no metaphysical right of man, for which the French 
cried, but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own 
toil, to save themselves and the little ones about their knees from 
hunger and cruel death. The mahunortable serfs of ecclesiastics 
are variously said to have been a million and a million and a half 
at the time of the Revolution. Burke's horror, as he thought of 
the priests and prelates who left palaces and dignities to earn a 
scanty living by the drudgery of teaching their language in strange 
lands, should have been alleviated by the thought that a million or 
more of men were rescued from ghastly material misery. Are 
we to be so overwhelmed with sorrow over the pitiful destiny of 
the men of exalted rank and sacred function, as to have no tears 
for the forty thousand serfs in the gorges of the Jura, who were 
held in dead-hand by the Bishop of Saint-Claude ? 

The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of the sub- 
ject about which he was writing. When he said, for instance, that 
the French before 1789 possessed all the elements of a constitu- 
tion that might l)e made nearly as good as could be wished, he said 
what many of his contemponiiies knew, and what all subsequent 
investigation and meditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-con- 
sidered and untrue. As to the social state of France, his 'informa- 
tion was still worse. He saw the dangers and disorders of the new 
system, but he saw a very little way indeed into the more cruel 
dangers and disorders of the old. iMackintosh replied to the Re- 
/lections aith manliness and temperance in the Viudicice Gallkce. 
'J homas Paine replied to them with an energy, courage, and elo- 
quence worthy of his cause, in the Rights of Man. But the sul)- 
stantial and decisive reply to Burke came from his former corre- 
spondent, the farmer at Bradfield, in Suffolk. Arthur Young 
]3u]^hshed W\^Travc/s in France some eighteen months after the 
Rejections (1792), and the pages of the twenty-first chapter, in 
which he closes his performance, as a luminous criticism of the 
most important side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred times 
more than Burke, Mackintosh, and Faine all put together. Young 
afterwards became panic-stricken, but his book remained. There 
the writer plainly enumerates without trope or invective the intol- 
erable burdens under which the great mass of the French people 
had for long years been groaning. It was the removal of these 
burdens that made the very heart's core of the Revolution, and 
gave to France that new life which so soon astonished and terrified 



I04 



BURKE. 



Europe. Yet Burke seems profoundly unconscious of the whol* 
ot them. He even boldly asserts that, when the several orders 
met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose their representatives and 
draw up their grievances and instructions, in no one of these in- 
structions did they charge, or even hint at, any of those tilings 
which had drawn upon the usurping Assembly the detestalionof 
the rational part of mankind. He could not have made a more 
enormous blunder. There was not a single great change made by 
the Assembly which had not been demanded in the lists of griev- 
ances that had been sent up by the nation to Versailles. The 
division of the kingdom into districts, and the proportioning of the 
representation to taxes and population ; the suppression of the 
intendants; the suppression of all monks, and the sale of their 
goods and estates; the abolition of feudal rights, duties, and ser- 
vices; the alienation of the King's domains ; the demolition of the 
Bastille; these and all else were in tlie prayers of half the peti- 
tions that the country had laid at the feet of the King. 

If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it might be 
of no imj:)ortance. But it was a blunder which went to the very 
root of the discussion. The fact that France was now at the 
back of the Assembly, inspiring its counsels and ratifying its de- 
crees, was the cardinal element, and that is the fact which at this 
stage Burke systematically ignored. That he should have so ig- 
nored it, left him in a curious position, for it left him without any 
rational explanation of the sources of the policy which kindled his 
indignation and contempt. A publicist can never be sure of his 
position, until he can explain to himself even what he does not wish 
to justify to others. Burke thought it enough to dwell upon the 
immense number of lawyers in the Assembly, and to show that law- 
yers are naturally bad statesmen. He did not look the state of 
things steadily in the face. It was no easy thing to do. But Burke 
was a man who ought to havti done it. He set all down to the ig- 
norance, folly, and^'wickedness of the French leaders. This was as 
shallow as the way in which his enemies, the pjiilosophers, used to 
sot down the superstition of eighteen centuries to the craft of 
priests, and all defects in the government of Europe to the cruelty 
of tyrants. How it came about that priests and tyrants acquired 
their irresistible power over men's minds, they never inquired. 
And Burke never inquired into the enthusiastic acquiescence of 
the nation, and what was mos*. remarkable of all, the acquiescence 
of the army, in the strong measures of the Assembly. Burke 
was, in truth, so appallea by the magnitude of the enterprise 
on which France had embarked, that he utterly forgot for once 
the necessity in political affairs, of seriously understanding the 
originating conditions of things. He was strangely content with 
the' explanations that came from the malignants at Coblenz, 
and he actually told Francis that he charged the disorders not on 
the mol). but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnave 
and Baillv, on Lamelh and Lafayette, who had spent immense 
sums of money, and used innumerable arts, to stir up the populace 



BURKE. 105 

throuijhout France to the commission of the enormities that were 
shocking the conscience of Europe. His imagination broke loose. 
Fiis practical reason was mastered by something that was deeper 
in him than reason. . 

This brings me to remark a really singular trait. In spite of the 
predominance of practical sagacity, of the habits and spirit of pubhc 
business, of vigorous actuality in Burke's character, yet at t-e 
bottom of all his thoughts about communities and gON'-rnments 
there lay a certain mysticism. It was no irony, no literary trope, 
when he talked of our having taught the American husbandman 
"piously to believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and parch- 
ment." He was using no otiose epithet, when he described the 
disposition of a stupendous wisdom, " moulding together the great 
mysterious incorporation of tlie human race." To him there ac- 
tually was an element of mystery in the cohesion of men in societies, 
in political obedience, in the sanctity of contract ; in all that fabric 
of law and charter and obligation, whether written or unwrittei;, 
which is the sheltering bulwark between civilisation and barbarism. 
When reason and history had contributed all that they could to the 
explanation, it seemed to him as if the vital force, the secret of or- 
ganisation, the binding framework, must still come from the impen- 
etrable regions beyond reasoning and beyond history. There was 
another great conservative writer of that age, whose genius was 
aroused into a protest against the revolutionary spirit, as vehement 
as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of the most learned, 
witty, and acute of all reactionary philosophers. De Maistre wrote 
a book on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions. He 
could only find this principle in the operation of occult and super- 
natural forces, producing the half-divine legislators who figure mys- 
teriously in the early history of nations. Hence he held, and with 
astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine that nothing else could 
deliver Europe from the Satanic forces of revolution — he used the 
word Satanic in all literal seriousness — save the divinely inspired 
supremacy of the Pope. No natural operations seemed at all ade- 
quate either to produce or to maintain the marvel of a coherent 
society. We are reminded of a professor who, in the fantastic 
days of geology, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be the re- 
mains of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards by 
a slow and stately motion ; the hieroglyphs were crystalline forma- 
tions ; and the shaft of the great Pyramid was the air-hole of a vol- 
cano. De Maistre preferred a similar explanation of the monstrous 
structures of modern society. The hand of man could never have 
reared, and could never uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke 
laboured in constant traviil with the same perplexity, it is at least 
true that he was keenly alive to it, and that one of the reasons why 
he dreaded to see a finger laid upon a single stone of a single polit- 
ical edifice, was his consciousness that "lie saw no answer to the 
perpetual enigma how any of these edifices had ever been built, and 
how the passion, violence, and waywardness of the natural mnn had 
ever been persuaded to bow their necks to the strong yoke of a 



Xo6 BURKx:.. 

common social discipline. Never was mysticism more unseason- 
able ; never was an hour when men needed more carefully to re- 
member Burke's own wise practical precept, when he was talking 
about the British rule in India, that we must throw a sacred veil 
over the beginnings of government. Many woes might perhaps 
have been saved to Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim to the 
government of the new France. 

Much has always been said about the inconsistency between 
Burke's enmity to the Revolution, and his enmity to Lord North in 
one set of circumstances, and to Warren Hastings in another. The 
pimphleteers of the day made selections from the speeches and 
tracts of his happier time, and the seeming contrast had its effect. 
More candid opponents admitted then, as all competent persons ad- 
mit now, that the inconsistency was merely verbal and superficial. 
Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, was only one of many who ob- 
served very early that this was the unmistakable temper of Burke's 
mind. " I admired, as everybody did," lie said, " the talents, but 
not the principles of Mr, Burke ; his op]3i)sition to the Clerical Pe- 
tition [for relaxation of subscription, 1772], first excited my suspi- 
cion of his being a High-Churchman in religion, and a Tory, per- 
haps an aristocratic Tory, in the state." Burke had, indeed, never 
been anything else than a conservative. He was like Falkland, 
who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on the same principles 
on which, after the outbreak of the civil war, he consented to be 
secretary of state to King Charles. Coleridge is borne out by a 
hundred passages, when he says that in Burke's writings at the be- 
ginning of the American Revolution, and in those at the beginning 
of the French Revolution, the principles are the same and the de- 
ductions are the same ; the practical inferences are almost opposite 
in the one case from those drawn in the other, yet in both equally 
legitimate. It would be better to say that they would have been 
equally legitimate, if Burke had been as right in his facts, and 
as ample in his knowledge in the case of France, as he was in 
the case of America. We feel, indeed, that, partly from want^ of 
this knowledge, he has gone too far from some of the wise maxims 
of an earlier time. What has become of the doctrine that all great 
public collections of men— he was then speaking of the House of 
Commons — " possess a marked love of virtue and an abhorrence of 
vice." * Why was the French Assembly not to have the benefit of 
this admirable generalisation ? What has become of all those say- 
ings about the presumption, in all disputes between nations and 
rulers, '' being at least upon a par in favour of the people ; " and a 
populace never rebelling from passion for attack, but from im]m- 
tience of suffering? And where is now that strong dictum, in the 
letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that "general rebellions and revolt' 
of a whole people never were encouraged, now or at any time ; thty 
are always provoked? " 

When all these things have been noted, to hold a man to his 

* A merican Taxation. 



BURKE. J 07 

formulae without referencs to their special application, is pure pec!- 
autry. Burke vvas the last man to lay down any political proposi- 
tion not subject to the ever varying interpretation of circumstances, 
and independently of the particular use which was to be made of it. 
Nothing universal, he had always said, can be rationally afiirmed 
on any moral or political subject. The lines of morality, again, 
are never ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad and deep as 
well as long, admitting of exceptions, and demanding modifications. 
** These exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process 
of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in 
rank of the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the 
regulator, the standard of them all. As no moral questions are even 
abstract questions, this, before I judge upon any abstract proposi- 
tion, must be embodied in circumstances ; for, since things are 
right and wrong, morally speaking, only by their relation and con- 
nection with other things, this very question of what it is politically 
right to grant, depends upon its relation to its effects." " Circum- 
stances," he says, never weary of laying down his great notion of 
political method, " give, in reality, to everv political principle its 
distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances 
are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or obnox- 
ious to mankind." 

This is at once the weapon with which he would have defended 
his own consistency, and attacked the absolute proceedings in 
France. He changed his front, but he never changed his ground. 
He was not more passionate against the proscription in France 
than he had been against the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the 
American war. " I flatter myself," he said in the Refectio7is, "that 
I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty." Ten years before he 
had said, "The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connect- 
ed with order." The court tried to regulate liberty too severely. 
It found in him an inflexible opponent. Demagogues tried to re- 
move the regulations of liberty. They encountered in him the 
bitterest and most unceasing of all remonstrants. The arbitrary 
majority in the House of Commons forgot for whose benefit they 
held power, from whom they derived their authority, and in what 
description of government it was that they had a place. Burke was 
the most valiant and strenuous champion in the ranks of the in- 
dependent minority. He withstood to the face the King and the 
King's friends. He withstood to the face Charles Fox and the 
Friends of the People. He may have been wrong in both, or in either, 
but it is unreasonable to tell us that he turned back in his course; 
that he was a revolutionist in 1770, and a reactionist in 1790 ; that 
he was in his sane mind when he opposed the supremacy of the 
Court, but that his reason was tottering when he opposed the su- 
premacy of the Faubourg Saint Antoine. 

There is no part of Burke's career at which we may not find 
evidence of his instinctive and undying repugnance to the critical 
or revolutionary spirit and all its works. From the early days 
when he had parodied Bolingbroke, down to the later time when he 



lo8 liURKE. 

denounced Condopcet as a fanatical atheist, with "every disposition 
to the lowest as well as the highest and most determined villanies," 
he invariably suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vici- 
ous, high-minded or ignorble, who inquired with too keen a scrutiny 
into the foundations of morals, of religion, of social order. To ex- 
amine with a curious or unfavourable eye the base of established 
opinions, was to show a leaning to anarchy, to atheism, or to un- 
bridled libertinism. Already we have seen how, three years after 
the publication of his Thoughts on the. Present Discontents^ and 
seventeen years before the composition of the Reflectio7iSy he de- 
nounced the philosophers with a fervour and a vehemence which 
he never aftet"wards surpassed. When some of the clergy petitioned 
to be relieved from some of the severities of subscription, he had 
resisted them on the bold ground that the truth of a proposition de- 
serves less attention than the effect of adherence to it upon the 
established order of things. " I will not enter into the question," 
he told the House of Commons, " how much truth is preferable to 
peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have scarcely 
ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other, I 
would, unless tlie truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace." 
In that intellectual restlessness, to which the world is so deeply 
indebted, Burke could recognise but scanty merit. Himself the 
most industrious and active-minded of men, he was ever sober in 
cutting the channels of his activity, and he would have had others 
equally moderate. Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is 
the end of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious 
in searching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base 
on which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Provided tliat there was 
peace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and content as is 
compatible with the conditions of the human lot, Burke felt that a 
too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle but 
cruel. 

If the world continues to read the Reflections^ and reads it with 
a new admiration that is not diminished by the fact that on the 
special issue its tendency is every day more clearly discerned to 
have been misleading, we may be sure that it is not for the sake 
of such things as the precise character of the Revolution of 1688, 
where, for that matter, constitutional writers have shown abundantly 
that Burke was nearly as much in the wrong as Dr. Sacheverell. 
Nor has the book lived merely by its gorgeous rhetoric and high 
emotions, though these have been contributing elements. It lives 
because it contains a sentiment, a method, a set of informal princi- 
ples, which, awakened into new life after -the Revolution, rapidly 
transformed the current ways of thinking and feeling about all the 
most serious objects of our attention, and have powerfully helped to 
give a richer substance to all modern literature. In the Reflections 
we have the first great sign that the ideas on government and 
philosophy which Locke had been the chief agent in setting into 
European circulation, and which had carried all triumphantly before 
them throughout the century, did not comprehend the whole truth 



B uRICE. ] oq 

nor the deepest truth about human character — the relations of men 
and the union of men in society. It has often been said that the? 
armoury from which the French philosophers of the eighteenth 
century borrowed their weapons was furnished from England, and 
it may be added as truly that the reaction against that whole scheme 
of thought came from England. In one sense we may call the 
ReJiectioHs a political pamphlet, but it is much more than this, just 
as the movement against which it was levelled was much more than 
apolitical movement. The Revolution rested on a philosophy, and 
Burke confronted it with an antagonistic philosophy. Those are 
but superficial readers who fail to see at how many points Burke, 
while seeming only to deal with the French monarchy and the 
British constitution, with Dr. Price and Marie Antoinette, was, in 
fact, and exactly because he dealt with them in the comprehensive 
spirit of true philosophy, turning men's minds to an attitude from 
which not only the political incidents of the hour, but the current 
ideas about religion, psychology, the very nature of human know- 
ledge, would ail be seen in a changed light and clothed in new 
colour. All really profound speculation about society comes in 
time to touch the iieart of every other object of speculation, not by 
directly contributing new truths or directly corroborating old ones, 
but by setting men ^o consider the consequences to life of different 
opinions on these abstract subjects, and tho-ir relations to the great 
paramount interests of society, however those interests may happen 
at the time to be conceived. Burke's book marks a turning-point 
in literary history, because it was the signal for that reaction over 
the whole field of thought, into whicii the Revolution drove many 
of the finest minds of tlie next generation, by showing the supposed 
consequences of pure individualistic rationalism. 

We need not attempt to work out the details of this extension 
of a political reaction into a universal reaction in philosophy and 
poetry. Any one may easily think out for himself what consequences 
in act and thought, as well as in government, would be likely to 
flow, for example, from one of the most permanently admirable sides 
of Burke's teaching — liis respect for the collective reason of men, 
and his sense of the impossiblity in politics and morals of considering 
the individual apart from the experience of the race. " We are 
afraid," he says, " to put men to live and trade each or. his own 
private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each 
man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail them- 
selves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. 
Many of our Jiieii of speculation^ instead of exploding general 
prejudices^ employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom 
which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they 
seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice with 
the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to 
leave nothing but the naked reason : because prejudice with its rea- 
son has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection 
which will give it premanence. Prejudice is of ready application 
in thG emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady 



,10 BURKE. 

course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating 
in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prej- 
udice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of uncon- 
nected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of 
his nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every man 
the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulated 
layers which various generations of ancestors have placed for him ; 
that the greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when 
they act most mechanically, and by the methods of an unques- 
tioned system ; that although no rule of conduct of spring of action 
ought to endure which does not repose in sound reason, yet this 
naked reason is in itself a less effective means of influencing action 
than when it exists as one part of a fabric of ancient and endeared 
ascociation } Interpreted by a mobile genius and expanded by a 
poetic imagination, all this became the ifoundation from which the 
philosophy of Coleridge started, and, as Mill has shown in a famous 
essay, Coleridge was the great apostle of the conservative spirit in 
England in its best form. 

Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the phil- 
osophy of order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave might have 
justly asked him whether, when we thus realise the strong and im- 
movable foundations which are laid in our character before we are 
born, there could be any occasion, as a matter of fact, for that ve- 
hement alarm which moved Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of 
parchment decrees, should overthrow the veneriited sentiments of 
Europe about justice and about property ? Should he not have 
known better than most men the force of the self-protecting ele- 
ments of society. 

This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues between 
the school of order and the school of progress. It is enough to 
have marked Burke's position in one- of them. The Reflectionns 
places him among the great Conservatives of history. Perhaps 
the only Englishman with whom in this respect he may be com- 
pared is Sir Thomas More, that virtuous and eloquent reactionist 
of the sixteenth century. More abounded in light, in intellectual 
interest, in single-minded care for the common weal. He was as 
anxious as any man of his time for the improved ordering of the 
Church, but he could not endure that reformation should be bought 
at the price of breaking up the ancient spiritual unity of Europe. 
He was willing to slay and be slain rather than he would tolerate 
the destruction of the old faith, or assent to the violence of the 
new statecraft. He viewed Thomas Cromwell's policy of reforma- 
tion just as Burke viewed Mirabeau's policy of revolution. Burke 
too, we may be very sure, would as willingly have sent Mirabeau 
and Bailly to prison or the block as More sent Philips to the Tower 
and Bainham to the stake. For neither More nor Burke was of 
the gentle contemplative spirit, which the first disorder of a new 
society just bursting into life mcrel}' overshadows with saddening 
regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was to them so bound 
up" with the purpose and meaning of life, that to wage active battle 



BURKE. in 

f;»T tlie <'ods of their rev-rence was the irresistible instinct of self- 
lierservation. More iiad i > excuse which 15urke liad not, for the 
principle of persecution wa , accepted by the best minds of the six- 
teenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it was 
emphatically repudiated. 

Another illustrious name of Ikirke's own era rises to our ■ 
as we ponder mentally the too scanty list of those who liave^rsaved 
the '^reat and hardy task of reconciling crder with pr'UB^^^gg Y'ur- 
got is even a more 'imposing figure than 13urke hi^^^jf^ j)^g j,^. 
pression made upon us i)y the nair^.R^eecS^t?!^' different, for Tur- 
gotwas austere, reserved^j^tant, a man of many silences, and much 
suS4M:<TsTe-;^^\t'htkrJ^-ke, as we know, was imaginative, exuberant, 
unrestrained, and, like some of the greatest actors on the stage of 
human affairs, he had associated his own personality with the pre- 
valence of riglit ideas and good influence. In Turgot, on the other 
hand, we discern something of the isolation, the sternness, the dis- 
dainful melancholy of Tacitus. He even rises out of the eager, 
bustling, shrill tongued crowd of the Voltairean age with some of 
that austere moral indignation and haughty astonishment with which 
Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men centuries before. 
On one side Turgot shared the conservatism of Burke, though, per- 
haps, he would hardly have given it that name. He habitually cor- 
rected the headlong insistence of the revolutionary philosophers, 
his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor benevolence, 
nor hope can ever dispense with justice ; and he could never en- 
dure to hear of great changes being wrought at the cost of this 
sovereign quality. Like Burke, he held fa^t to the doctrine that 
'""erything must be done for the multitude, but nothing by them. 
Like Burke, he realized how close are the links that bind the suc- 
cessive generations of men, and make up the long chain of human 
history. Like Burke, he never believed that the human mind 
has any spontaneous inclination to welcome pure truth. Here, 
however, is visible between them a hard line of division. It 
is not error, said Turgot, which opposes the ]Drogress of truth ; it 
is indolence, obstinacy, and the spirit of routine. But then Tur- 
got enjoined upon us to make it the aim of life to do battle in our- 
selves and others with all this indolence, obstinacy, and spirit of 
routine in the world ; while Burke, on the contrary, gave to these 
bad things gentler names, he surrounded them with the picturesque 
associations of the past, and in the great world-crisis of his time 
he threw all his passion and all his genius on their side. Will any 
reader doubt which of these two types of the school of order and 
justice, both of them noble, is the 'more valuable for the race, and 
the worthier and more stimulating ideal for the individual? 

^t IS not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a moment 
startled by the suspicion that he might unawares be fighting against 
the truth. In the midst of flaming and bitter pages, we now and 
again feel a cool breath from the distant region of a half-pensive 
tolerance. " I do not think," he says at the close of the Reflections, 
to the person to whom they were addressed, " that my sentiments 



112 BURKE. 

are likely to alter yours. I do not know that they ought. You are 
young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your 
country. But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some 
future form which your commonwealth may take. In the present 
it can hardly remain ; but before its final settlement it may be ob- 
liged to pass, as one of our poets says, ' through great varieties of 
untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire 
and blood." , 

He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething 
chaos might after 'yll be the struggle upwards of the germs of order. 
Among the later words that he wroVe on the Revolution were 
these : " If a great change is to be made in human affairs,, thq 
minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings- 
will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it ; an»r 
then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in humai 
affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence 
itself than the mere designs of men." We can only regret that 
these rays of the mens divhiior did not shine with a more steadfast 
light ; and that a spirit which, amid the sharp press of manifold 
cares and distractions, had ever vibrated with lofty sympathies, 
was not now more constant to its faith in the beneficent powers 
and processes of the Unseen Time. 



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Tom Brown at Oxford, 

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